Google will stop selling ads based on your specific web page

The decision, coming from the world’s largest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from using such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and under the supervision of regulators.

Google’s levy means the move is also likely to backfire on some competitors in the digital advertising industry, with many companies relying on tracking individuals to measure their ads, measure their effectiveness and stop fraud. According to Jounce Media, a digital advertising consulting firm, 52% of global digital advertising spending was $ 292 billion last year.

“If digital advertising does not evolve to address the growing concerns of people about their privacy and how their personal identities are being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” said David Temkin, Google Product Manager who led the change, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Google announced last year that it would remove the most commonly used such tracking technology, called third-party cookies, in 2022. But now the company says it will not build alternative detection technologies, or use the ones developed by other entities. , to replace third-party cookies for its own advertising purchasing tools.

Instead, Google says its ad purchasing tools will use new technologies they’ve developed with others in a ‘privacy sandbox’ to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple sites. One such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their own devices and enables advertisers to target composite groups of users with similar interests, or ‘cohorts’, rather than individual users. Google said in January that it plans to begin public testing of the use of that technology in the second quarter.

Google’s failure to deliver individualized tracking across multiple sites could reform the industry, given the market power of its advertising buying tools. About 40% of the money that flows from advertisers to publishers on the open Internet – that is, the share of digital advertising outside of closed systems such as Google Search, YouTube or Facebook – goes according to Google’s advertising tools.

Google says its announcement on Wednesday does not cover its advertising tools and unique identifiers for mobile applications, only for websites. However, the plan is the latest sign that the tide is likely to turn on the user tracking breaker.

appeal Inc.,

is working on its own plans to limit the use of the app by requiring developers to obtain permission for users before collecting an ad identifier for iPhones. At the same time, European Union privacy regulators have filed several complaints about the information that websites share with third parties about the content that users view as part of such detection.

One set of complaints comes from Brave Software Inc., maker of a privacy-focused web browser, where Google’s Mr Temkin was chief product officer until last summer. Google says the involvement of Mr. Temkin at his plan shows his commitment to the privacy of users. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google’s changes come as large technology companies face several antitrust inquiries. Smaller digital advertising businesses that use tracking in different areas have accused Apple and Google of using privacy as a pretext for changes that harm competitors. And Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call in January that “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.”

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority, the country’s largest antitrust regulator, last month launched a formal investigation into Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. The investigation stemmed from a complaint from a group of marketers who argued that Google’s plan would confirm the company’s leverage in the online advertising space.

A Google spokesman said the company had briefed the UK’s CMA on its plan to end its own use of unique detection on multiple sites.

Google’s announcement is hampering the advertising industry’s efforts to devise an alternative, more privacy-friendly technology to target individual consumers, such as those led by the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a group of advertisers and advertising technology companies on new identifiers. such as strings of numbers and letters derived from users’ email addresses. Without directly mentioning the effort of the partnership, Mr. Temkin refers to identifiers “based on people’s email addresses” as examples of tools that Google will not use.

Google has acknowledged that other companies may pursue other ways to track users. Businesses that use parts of Google’s advertising infrastructure, such as ad exchanges, may still be able to sell ads that use their own unique identifiers, Google said. However, the company said it would not use or invest in such tools for ads it sells.

“We realize this means that other providers may offer a level of user identity for online ad tracking that we would not do,” he said. Temkin wrote in the blog post. “We do not believe that these solutions will meet the growing expectations of consumers for privacy, nor will they be able to meet rapidly changing regulatory constraints.”

There are exceptions to Google’s plan. The company’s limit on unique tracking identifiers does not extend to so-called first-party data – information that a business receives directly from a customer. For example, sites may only sell ads based on users’ activity on that particular site.

It also means that Google will continue to allow advertisers to target ads on Google services such as YouTube to specific customers for whom they already have contact information. But when the changes take effect, Google will stop targeting such ads to those people when they browse other sites.

Nestle SA,

a major advertiser who informed Google about the changes says he welcomes the privacy initiative.

“We have long recognized and advocated the importance of first-party data, and it will become even more important in a first-world privacy,” said Aude Gandon, Nestle’s global head of marketing.

Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected] and Keach Hagey at [email protected]