Google is distancing itself from user-tracking “cookies” that allow web giants to provide personalized ads but have also raised the bar of privacy defenders.
Last month, Google unveiled the results of tests featuring a long-standing tracking option, claiming that it could improve privacy online privacy while enabling advertisers to serve relevant messages.
“This approach allows individuals to ‘effectively hide in crowds’ and use on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser,” explained Chetna Bindra, Google’s product manager, at the unveiling of a system called Federated Learning CF Cohorts (FLOC).
“The results suggest that when it comes to generating interest-based audiences, FLoC can provide an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies.”
Google plans to begin testing the FLoC approach with advertisers from its Chrome browser later this year.
Bindra added, “Advertising is necessary to keep the web open to everyone, but the web ecosystem is at risk if privacy practices do not meet changing expectations.”
Google has plenty of incentives for change. U.S. The Internet giant has been criticized by critics over user privacy, and is well aware of the law’s trends in protecting people’s data rights.
The growing fear of cookie-tracking has led to support for internet rights laws such as GDPR in Europe, and the Internet giant is paving the way for effective targeting of ads without anyone knowing more about it.
– ‘Privacy night dream’ –
Some types of cookies – which are text files when a user visits a website – have the ability to log in and browse frequently visited sites.
There are cookies to thank anyone who has created a registration page just to enter their name and address automatically. But some see other types of cookies as impotent.
“Third-party cookies are a privacy nightmare,” Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AFP.
“You don’t have to know what everyone did to serve the ad.”
He argued that context-based advertising could be effective; An example of someone looking at recipes on a cooking website is showing ads for a cookware or grocery store.
Safari and Firefox browsers have already removed third-party cookies, but they are still used on the world’s most popular browser – Chrome.
Chrome accounted for 63 percent of the global browser market last year.
“Continuing to use third-party cookies for Google is both a competitive and legal responsibility, but they want their advertising business to continue to thrive,” Cyphers said.
Ciphers and others have used the secret formula to lure Internet users into groups and give them “agreeable” badges, worrying about Google being used to target marketing messages without knowing who they are.
“It’s likely that many privacy issues are exacerbated,” Cyphers said, adding that the new system suggests that people with less transparency could create “group” badges of people who could be targeted.
Cyphers said, “There’s a black box for learning machines that will take everything you’ve done in your browser and spit a label that says you’re the kind of person.”
“Advertisers are going to decode what those labels mean.”
He expected advertisers to eventually decide which labels included a particular age, race or ethnicity and who would be the victims of extreme political views.
Marketers for the Open Pun Web Business Alliance are campaigning against Google’s support measures, questioning its effectiveness and arguing that it will push more advertisers into its “walled gardens.”
“Google’s proposals are bad for independent media owners, bad for independent advertising technology and bad for marketers,” Coalition Director James Roswell said in a statement.
GC / RL
