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A handful of new standards will personalize ads without today’s privacy violations.
The Internet is about to undergo a dramatic shift towards privacy.
Today, advertisers like Facebook and Google use cookies to track people as they interact with different websites, creating profiles for the sake of targeted marketing. But on Wednesday, Google, a giant in the global digital advertising market, announced that it would stop using this type of system to track people on the web. Instead, he plans to develop methods of targeting ads without using individual browsing histories.
One of those methodsD Create groups of users with similar interests, allowing advertisers to target groups of people without identifying any individual. It would also keep data on your devices – instead of allowing businesses to track you across all websites, Google’s Chrome browser would generate an anonymous profile of your interests and use it to request a suitable advertisement for you.
To build a system like this, Google and its partners have built a number of new technologies under the banner of the privacy sandbox, advertised as a way to hide individual users “from the crowd.” The privacy sandbox is not a single technology, but a handful of new standards that would allow advertising to continue to exist and function in a similar way to today, without the serious privacy violations enabled by tracking cookies.
One of the most notable technologies in the privacy sandbox is a proposed web standard called federated learning cohorts (FLoC). This is the standard that creates interest groups locally in the browser. without sending individual data to a server. When a page wants to show an ad, it will request one based on the cohort the user has placed in, rather than their specific browsing history.
Another proposed standard, FLEDGE, would allow advertisers to create “custom audiences” without using the cookies that power this ability today. Custom audiences allow advertisers to target previous website visitors, a practice called retargeting. It’s what makes it possible for those shoes you once reviewed to follow you in ads on the internet.
Also included in the privacy sandbox are proposals that hide your home network’s IP address from websites and new technology that would automatically block requests for information from your device when it becomes clear that a site is asking for too much.
The privacy litter box is still a band-aid solution – it improves privacy but makes obvious compromises that advertising continues to attract shoppers.
Some of these standards, as proposed, have significant loopholes: FLoC, for example, anonymizes users in groups, but individuals in those groups can easily be anonymized and tracked if a site knows their email address or other information. personal. That means if you are logged into Facebook, for example, the company could easily find out which group you belong to and link that information to your advertising profile on their site. The FLoC proposal supports this, but does not satisfactorily address how users could mitigate this.
All of these standards make it clear that Google is finally starting to push for privacy improvements on the web. But it’s not worth a big reason for Google’s sudden interest in privacy that your business is under threat.
Last March, Apple announced that it would block tracking cookies by default. in Safari on iOS and macOS, a move that meant advertisers suddenly couldn’t follow people using those products on the web almost overnight. Google runs the risk of losing users, who are increasingly privacy conscious, if it does not adapt quickly to compete on privacy.
Fortunately for Google, it develops the world’s most popular desktop browser, Chrome, and can implement new ad targeting systems more or less on its own. While the company has proposed its privacy sandbox projects as web standards for everyone to adopt, it is unclear whether other browsers, such as Mozilla’s Firefox or Apple’s Safari, plan to implement the basic standards.
However, recent standards group meetings have been well attended by publishers and advertisers, including the BBC, the New York Times, IAB and Facebook. Getting publishers to jump on new technology, which supports their advertising business models, could make it easier for other browsers to get the hang of it.
By introducing these new web standards, Google ensures that it can continue to sell targeted advertising and boost privacy on the web.
Which explains why, overall, the privacy litter box is still a band-aid solution: It improves privacy but makes obvious compromises that advertising continues to attract shoppers. Such is the tension: Targeted advertising still needs to be data-fueled in some way, and there will always be loopholes that allow technology to be abused, as tracking cookies were for decades.
But advertising is not necessarily bad. Tim Hwang’s fantastic book Subprime attention crisis examines the tension between the privacy nightmares of advertising and how the best and weirdest parts of the Internet have historically been supported by advertising, describing it as the “time bomb at the heart of the Internet.”
Google’s proposals attempt to improve privacy on the web by controlling the Wild West of crawlers and allowing publishers and creators to fund their work, rather than demonizing advertising as a legitimate business model. While it might be an imperfect solution, I’m not sure the internet we know and love can continue to exist without something like that.
