Google plans to stop selling adverts based on tracking

*The global tech giant’s goal is to create a ‘privacy-first’ Internet experience for consumers

Isola Moses | ConsumerConnect

In a significant pro-consumer shift, global tech giant Google is giving tracking technologies the boot, announcing that it plans to stop selling adverts based on individuals’ browsing across multiple Web sites.

It was learnt that the company said the policy had undetermined exactly how much cutting that slice out of Google’s ad business will set the company back, but it could be plenty.

According to Statista, Google’s total ad revenue in 2020 amounted to $146.92 billion spread across its extensive ad network.

Nonetheless, the important pro-consumer point here is that Google seems to be more concerned with what it calls an “erosion of trust” from people who venture out online in recent times.

David Temkin, Google’s Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust, said: “As our industry has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies.

“This has led to an erosion of trust: In fact, 72 percent of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms, or other companies, and 81 percent say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center.

If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web.”

What changes to expect

This change won’t happen overnight, but there is already forward progress.

As a precursor to this move, the company announced in late January 2021, that it was going to phase out third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser.

Once third-party cookies are completely phased out, Temkin vowed that Google would not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will the company use them in its products.

In its cookieless future, Google wants everything relating to advertising — targeting, measurement, and fraud prevention — to be in line with the standards set by its own Privacy Sandbox.

If all goes according to plan, cookies will be replaced by application programming interfaces (API) that advertisers will use to gather five unique pieces of data, including how well an ad performed and what platform actually leveraged a purchase out of an ad on its site(s).

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