Google’s Latest Move for User Privacy

What’s New

Last week, Google made a few announcements in the form of a blog post about how it plans to move toward a more privacy-driven analysis of consumer browsing behaviors for targeted advertising purposes. 

 In it, they stated:

• Google will not sell ads that rely on a person’s identifiable, individual web browsing history.
• Google won’t use or build additional tools to track a person’s identifiable data across its products (sorry, Trade Desk!). 

Google announced over a year ago its move away from third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022 as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The tech and advertising community has been abuzz ever since about what this means for Google’s core business model (monetizing people’s browsing data) and how these changes affect the ad tech industry. 

While Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser already blocked third-party cookies years ago, Google’s announcement made headlines because Google is the search heavyweight champion, representing about 2/3 of the browser market share. 

From Stalking to Segmentation

Moving forward, they plan to use more privacy-based strategies, such as Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). Instead of stalking and recording someone’s personal browsing habits online as they journey from one website to the next, the user is anonymized, grouped, and placed into a bucket (called a “cohort’) with others who have similar browsing behaviors and habits. Advertisers can then target those groups rather than an individual person. 

In other words, your general browsing behavior is still being tracked and sold to advertisers for targeted marketing — it’s just in a more anonymized and aggregated way. They are now targeting the collective you, not you specifically. This practice isn’t new: Facebook profiles its users in a similar way for advertising purposes.

Why Now?

For years, Google has seen the writing on the wall: Europe considers privacy a fundamental human right and enacted considerable laws and regulations in 2018 to crack down on large corporations, including Google, that don’t follow customer privacy laws. By making attempts to police itself, Google may be trying to mitigate future large-scale legislation passed in the U.S. (California and Virginia have already begun this process).

What Does This Mean?

It's too early to tell how Google's newest announcement will alter campaign strategies for marketing agencies. We'll keep you updated as we learn more in the coming months.