Google has announced that it won’t implement new tracking technology after phasing out support for third-party cookies.
The search giant’s director of product management for ads privacy and trust, David Temkin, said in a blog post that “once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”
Google previously stated that it was slowly phasing out third-party tracking cookies and has now clarified that it won’t replace them with similar technology.
“We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not, like [personally identifiable information] graphs based on people’s email addresses,” the blog post reads.
“We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment.”
Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies for quite some time and Google is now following suit. The search giant says it wants to move towards a “more privacy-first web.”
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean ads won’t be targeted at all. Temkin instead notes that due to advances in aggregation, anonymization and other technologies, it’s not necessary to track users across the web for digital advertising anymore.
Google isn’t getting rid of targeted advertising, it’s instead looking for ways to replace old methods with newer less invasive ones.
For instance, Google is testing FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which allows ads to be targeted at large groups of users based on their common interests. Temkin notes that the search giant will begin testing this with advertisers later this year.
Source: Google
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