Google Claims It Will Stop Tracking Individual Users for Ads
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Google claims it will stop tracking individual users for ads:
As Google's plan to kill third-party tracking cookies ramps up, the company is answering questions about what will replace it. Many people have wondered: if Google kills cookies, won't the company just cook up some other method for individually tracking users?
Today, Google answered that concern in a post on its "Ads & Commerce" blog, pledging it won't come up with "any technology used for tracking individual people." The company wrote:
We continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.
You might look at that statement and think that Google is sacrificing something or turning over a new leaf when it comes to privacy, but really, the fact is Google doesn't need to track individuals for advertisements. Google's cookie-tracking replacement technology, the Chrome "Privacy Sandbox," uses group tracking, which is more in line with how advertisers think anyway.
As Google puts it in its blog post, "advertisers don't need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers." If you're an advertiser with a phone ad, you would only ever want to show your ad to "people who care about phones." As an advertiser, you wouldn't really care about individuals or exact browsing history, as long as you knew they were open to being manipulated by your ad.
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