[ad_1]
Google has announced a plan to address privacy concerns in online advertising, as the company attempts to strike a middle ground between Apple’s privacy approach and the needs of advertisers, including itself.
Google will use AI to group an individual user with similar visitors in an attempt to convince users that they don’t need to block all tracking on the internet to preserve their privacy. It will also use a “trusted server” to store ads without the need to connect to hundreds of providers on the web in general, and cryptography to ensure that advertisers only find the information they need to pay for the websites.
“We believe that the notion that ‘it’s privacy or it’s advertising’ is a false choice,” said Chetna Bindra, Google’s director of user trust and privacy for advertising. “We truly believe that there is a way to meet user expectations and protect their identity, while allowing ad-supported content.”
Google says that it will soon start experimenting in Chrome, its browser, on how to actually do it. A new “privacy sandbox” groups five proposals with bird-themed codenames, including Floc (federated cohort learning), Fledge (first “locally executed group decision experiment”) and turtledove (two uncorrelated requests , then locally executed decision on victory), which explore various ways to allow advertisers to continue to target ads on the Internet, but without the vast surveillance ecosystem that exists to support that.
It’s an approach that differs from the simpler option selected by Apple for Safari: it just blocks all surveillance. Bindra said there are several reasons the company took a different path.
One is that Google has a more optimistic view than its competitor of the importance of advertising. “We believe that ads play an important role in making the Internet accessible and open,” he said, specifically noting the need for marketers to “connect with people interested in what they have to offer.”
But that optimism is combined with a pessimistic view of what the surveillance blockade really means: an arms race between the blockers and the blockaded. “A big focus of this effort has been to ensure that the ad industry is not driven towards alternative solutions for their business where they are actually circumventing true user privacy,” said Bindra. “We’ve certainly seen that happen in recent years, where companies have relied on things like fingerprints and other alternative techniques to be able to fix the absence of third-party cookies in certain browsers.”
But regardless of what Google does with online advertising, the company is walking a tightrope. With Chrome’s share of the browser market and Google’s share of the online advertising market, you have to keep an eye out for the Competition and Markets Authority, which has already announced plans to try to limit Google’s power. At the same time, you must satisfy the Information Commissioner’s Office, which has launched its own investigation into privacy in the adtech ecosystem.
