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When Google announced its plan to block digital tracking cookies from the Chrome web browser two years ago, the ad industry and regulators worried that the proposal would further consolidate the search giant’s dominance over online ads.
Scream required at the end Google will delay its rollout About two years until the end of 2023.
On Tuesday, Google said it was shelving its old plan and introducing a new way to block third-party trackers in Chrome with an online advertising system called Topics. The new system will still eliminate cookies, but will inform advertisers about interests such as “fitness” or “autos and vehicles” based on the last three weeks of the user’s web browsing history. Topics will be stored for three weeks before being deleted.
While Google’s plan to eliminate cookies by the end of next year is potentially a big change for the digital advertising industry, it’s unclear whether the new method the company will begin testing in the first quarter of this year will be less of a concern. to advertisers and regulators. Google Chrome, the world’s most widely used web browser, is used by two out of every three internet surfing people. StatCounter.
Google said in 2019 it will eliminate third-party trackers in Chrome through an initiative called Privacy Sandbox. Trackers allow ad services to track users around the web to learn about their browsing habits. The company then unveiled a plan known as federated learning of cohorts, or FLoC. It is intended to allow advertisers to target groups of users based on common browsing history rather than individuals.
Apple also cracked down on advertisers, limiting their ability to track users as they surf the web. Last year the company was introduced Application Monitoring TransparencyNET, which allows users to block apps from tracking them, a decision that has caused concern at Facebook and other major advertisers.
Because marketers rely heavily on cookies to target ads and measure their effectiveness, Google’s privacy recommendation has raised concerns that it will strengthen the company’s dominance in the industry, as Google already knows a lot about the interests and habits of its users. Privacy experts feared that the cohorts could expose users to new forms of tracking.
Google’s proposal also caught the attention of regulators. The European Union said it was investigating the plan as part of an investigation into Google’s role in the digital advertising market. Last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority reached an agreement with Google to allow the regulator to review changes to trackers in Chrome as part of resolving another investigation.
Google said the issues would address some of the concerns raised by privacy advocates about FLoC and prevent further stealth tracking techniques. It aims to protect user privacy by dividing its audience into larger groups.
Google said there were tens of thousands of potential groups under the previous plan, but that would reduce the number of Threads to just under a few thousand. The company said users will be able to see which topics are associated with them and remove them if they wish.
Google said it will use human curators instead of allowing the machine learning technology to create user groups, as in the Threads FLoC plan. Google said this would eliminate the possibility of groups being based on sensitive characteristics such as sexual orientation or race.
“There were several research studies that showed concerns about this happening,” Vinay Goel, who heads the Privacy Sandbox initiative at Google, said in an interview. “We found no evidence that it happened.”
Google’s Topics plan reflects an overhaul of its search product a few years ago. In 2019, the company gave users the ability to set their search history to be automatically cleared every three or 18 months. This has made it difficult for advertisers to target individuals with highly personalized ads based on web traffic. Google has also given users the ability to opt out of saving their search histories altogether.
Critics pointed out that privacy controls are ineffective because they’re hard for the average person to find, and by default Google continues to keep a permanent record of people’s search histories.
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