Google To Drop Personalized Ad Tracking

We have all seen the pop-up notification when we visit a website, notifying us to the use of ‘cookies’. Cookies store small amounts of information about what a user is doing on a website, from what is in their shopping basket, to whether they are logged in or what they have browsed. A third-party tracking cookie can follow a user from website to website and is responsible for why you may shop for a pair of shoes on one website and see advertisements for said shoes or similar on your social media page or another website. These third-party cookies let a website know that you are shopping around for a certain product and allow advertisers to advertise said product to you across the world wide web. In a big move, tech giant Google, has now decided to phase out these third-party cookies on their web browser, Chrome. 

Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers available and Google is following in the footsteps of competitor browsers Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari in eliminating third-party cookies. Safari had limited cookies in 2017, Firefox in 2019 and Chrome first announced that it would remove third party cookies in 2019.

Google is one of the world’s largest advertising sellers and its choice to remove cookies could have a significant impact on the advertising market as we know it. The removal of cookies would effectively mean that less information is shared with third parties, or advertisers. 

Googles move will make it far more difficult for advertisers to track the web activity of billions of people. Some critics have also argued that this move may put smaller advertising companies out of business and affect those websites that lean on advertising income. Wired argued that Googles decision serves to ‘tighten its grip on the advertising industry as a whole’ writing: ‘for most people, the change will be invisible but, behind the scenes, Google is planning to put Chrome in control of some of the advertising process. To do this it plans to use browser-based machine learning to log your browsing history and lump people into groups alongside others with similar interests.’

However, although some critics suggested that Google’s elimination of third-party tracking would allow the tech giant to do this kind of tracking in house. However, in the companies’ blog-post announcing the decision, Google wrote: “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build [alternative] identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.” The BBC summarized: 

‘It said the knock-on effect was that other providers could end up offering “a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not” (although Firefox and Safari already block the offending cookies by default).”We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long-term investment,” Google said.’

Wired reported that Google’s new system will work as follows: 

‘Google’s plan is to target ads against people’s general interests using an AI system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). The machine learning system takes your web history, among other things, and puts you into a certain group based on your interests. Google hasn’t defined what these groups will be yet but they will include thousands of people that have similar interests. Advertisers will then be able to put ads in front of people based on the group they’re in.

If Google’s AI works out you really like sneakers, for example, then you’ll be chucked in a group with other similarly-minded sneaker fans. It all works in a similar way to how Netflix’s algorithm works out what you might like to watch. In essence, your viewing history is similar, but not identical to, plenty of others. If Person A and Person B both like the same four horror films, for example, then chances are Person A will like a fifth horror film that Person B has just watched. Now just expand that out to cover billions of people.’ 

Another big difference will be that third party cookies are shared across the internet, but this data will be processed in Google’s browser chrome. Google will begin trials of the new system FLoC in March, only utilizing websites that have tracking enabled or already using display advertising. The plan to replace third-party cookies comes from it’s Privacy Sandbox which aims to improve online advertising rather than eliminate it and many say this will be an improvement on the existing system.