Third-party cookies have increasingly fallen by the wayside as the public becomes more protective of privacy rights in an era of algorithms and data. Some major browsers, including Firefox and Safari, now block third-party cookies by default, further reducing their usefulness for advertisers. And Google has already said it plans to do the same in its browser, Chrome.
The future of tracking-based web advertising, Google argued, will be more abstract, relying less on an individual’s browser history and more on the groups of Internet users they may be viewing at any time.
Given Google’s huge role in the advertising world and its control of the world’s most popular web browser, the company has the potential to determine how the next generation of ad technology works. But Google’s vision is not the only one. Realizing that change may be on the horizon, privacy advocates and others in the industry have come up with different ideas about how the future should play out. At the same time, lawmakers are setting new regulations and questioning Google’s dominance in ways that can have a significant impact on the company’s ability to deliver on its plan.
A more anonymous form of tracking?
To understand what Google is doing, it’s good to think about Facebook.
Facebook also makes money by running ads. It does not sell user information directly to advertisers; instead, it offers advertisers the opportunity to target ads to certain categories of Facebook users based on that data. Hacking and hacking people’s identities by their relationship status, the pages they’ve liked and even the content they click on allows Facebook to sell access to highly specific groups.
The system being developed by Google and others in standards-setting forums is based on the same principle, according to policy experts. Brands could advertise to “groups” of Internet users who share similar characteristics, as defined by an algorithm. But unlike today, marketers would not have access to specific data about individual members of the cohort.
The approach advocated by Google would theoretically give users more power than the Facebook model. Instead of centralizing all user data under one roof, the web history of Internet users would remain stored in their own browsers or devices. Depending on which version of this idea is implemented – there are many – users may have settings that allow them to control what information their browser shares with the world. Ads for shoes and camping gear can still follow you on the Internet this way, but advertisers would now be showing those ads to you and thousands of others as a group, not as an individual.
This concept, which Google is currently testing, is designed to replace third-party tracking cookies, which can track you from site to site and develop a highly detailed image of your browsing history for advertising purposes.
“Fundamentally, it scares people,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of News Media Alliance, a trade association that represents news publishers. So if you’re a tech giant like Google, whose business depends on user tracking, Chavern said, “you want to be ahead of those curves.”
Privacy advocates are cautious
Google says its vision of the future helps to improve user privacy, while offering advertisers the same ability to reach the public.
“Advertisers don’t have to track individual consumers on the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising,” argued the company on its blog. “Advances in aggregation, anonymity, in-device processing and other privacy preservation technologies offer a clear path for replacing individual identifiers.”
Some privacy experts agree that the Google-backed proposal would be an improvement over the status quo – at least in theory.
“For me, it is a good step and a good sign, but I would like to see the final package of solutions,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher and former chief technology officer at the Federal Trade Commission.
One of the most important factors to note, said Soltani, is how user controls are designed. Do they offer a one-click mechanism for users to opt out of all data sharing? Can users choose what types of data to share with advertisers? Are the controls easy for the average person to find and use?
Others are more skeptical, arguing that the proposal only switches from one form of invasive monitoring to another.
“We must imagine a better world without the myriad of problems with targeted ads,” wrote Cyphers.
What the advertising industry wants
Some in the advertising industry are working on an alternative to Google’s approach.
“The Google announcement has not changed our plans to provide a new portfolio of approaches to addressability, with privacy and with auditable responsibility,” said Bill Tucker, PRAM’s chief executive, in a statement responding to the Google blog.
Without naming the PRAM, Google found the email-based approach impractical.
“We do not believe that these solutions will meet consumers’ growing expectations of privacy,” said the agency on its blog, “nor will they face rapidly evolving regulatory constraints and therefore are not a long-term sustainable investment.”
Privacy and policy experts also criticized the email-based approach. As with other forms of supposedly “anonymous” data, they said, it is trivial to reverse engineer a person’s identity by combining scrambled information with other publicly available data.
In a way, they added, using scrambled email addresses is even worse from a privacy standpoint than using cookies, which can at least be easily erased from a browser.
“I have the same personal email address as the late 90s,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a commercial group that represents digital publishers. “It’s almost impossible to clean. So it is a fallacy that some hashed emails are more private than a cookie.”
Google’s new solution can make you more powerful
Even if it is moving away from the third-party cookie, that does not mean that Google has become the knight of consumers in shining armor. As the company faces several antitrust lawsuits by state and federal officials over its mastery of search and advertising, the Google-backed tracking proposal is being examined to find out how it could further strengthen the company.
“Google is the biggest crawler for any company on the internet,” said Kint. “They are competing in the same market where they are designing the rules.”
Google’s control over key technology products and its ability to process data at scale provide immense advantages – and an incentive to abuse them, Soltani agreed. If Google acts to maintain a kind of advantage in domestic court, it could increase the clamor of Google’s antitrust critics, he added.
Still, he said, “what are the standards, what are the controls, I think, in the end will dictate how sincere Google’s momentum is.”
Google told CNN Business that, according to its proposal, the advertising giant would have no special access to browsing data. Google will only be able to see the same aggregate information as the rest of the market, the company said. But the company has not ruled out the possibility of combining browsing cohorts with the huge amounts of data that Google collects about individual users of its many products and services.