It was in January last year that Google announced plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome browsers by 2022. As part of this effort, Google announced on March 3 that it will stop selling targeted advertising that uses personal web browsing history from third-party cookies.
“Consumers shouldn’t be tracked across web browsing to see ads that are relevant to individuals,” said David Temkin, director of product management for Google’s advertising privacy and trust team. “Advertisers don’t have to track individual consumers across the web to improve ad performance,” he said.
Given that Google has been making money from ad serving optimized for user browsing data over the years, most people will be skeptical of these statements.
Of course, Google isn’t willing to let go of advertising revenue. By using an API that uses the “Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC)” technology, which replaces “individuals” with “groups of a certain size with similar interests”, it is difficult to identify individuals.
They are trying to realize efficient advertisement distribution. In other words, although they collect information from individuals, they collect it with people with similar hobbies and analyze it with AI.
FloC-based ad serving technology will be piloted in a Chrome browser update scheduled for later this month, with the goal of having Google Ads advertisers test the API in the second quarter. thing. In addition, users will be able to set privacy settings corresponding to the new mechanism around April.
Targeting advertisements by companies called IT giants and information gathering from searches conducted by Google have been criticized by the US Congress in recent years, and even if you look at Google alone, antitrust from the Judiciary Ministry and some states Multiple large-scale legal proceedings have been filed.
In addition, Google has indicated that it will respond to the strengthening of personal information protection in Europe and the United States.
These moves are not limited to Google, but Apple, for example, will require the display of personal information collected by apps in the App Store from the end of 2020. Apple will also step up measures against targeted advertising.
By the way, this announcement is about collecting personal information in the Chrome browser, and tracking by the Android OS distributed by Google and targeting by personal information collected from the device will continue as before.
Recode reports that the changes based on this announcement will have a significant impact on the web advertising industry, but will have little impact on Google’s revenue itself.