In the world of online advertising, relevance is relative. An advertisement targeting system might not live up to the ideal of delivering exactly the right message to the right person at the right time — but if it’s the best of the available alternatives, then the advertising dollars will follow.
So it is easy to understand the sense of dread felt by many online publishers and ad tech companies as one of the linchpins of the advertising-supported internet — the third-party cookie — heads off into the sunset. Apple was the first to sound the death knell for these identifiers that track users as they move around the web, blocking them in its Safari browser. Google has said its Chrome browser, which accounts for more than half of web traffic, will stop supporting them by early 2022.
That might not matter if it leaves everyone on an equal footing in a more privacy-respecting future. But the warring plans for what will replace cookies — and Google’s ability to shape the future for much of the industry — make that highly unlikely.
The search giant delivered its latest broadside on the subject this week, in the process earning itself flattering headlines for promising to end the era of personal profiling based on privacy-invasive web tracking. But to rivals, it has come to feel as though Google is out to deliberately demonise them to tilt the playing field in its own favour.
This week, for instance, it sought to cast a cloud over the use of email addresses to help with ad targeting. If publishers combine their users’ email addresses with data held by other companies to build up personal profiles, it warned, then both internet users and regulators are likely to reject the idea. No matter that Google itself has a trove of personal information about people signed in on its own services and faces no obstacles in building up a very precise picture of their interests.
As the owner of the most widely used web browser, key parts of the ad-tech supply chain and some of the most widely used ad-supported internet services, Google has a clear ability to shape the future for everyone. For instance, its own advertising services will follow the new post-cookie techniques, dubbed the Privacy Sandbox, that are being trialled by Chrome, guaranteeing them wide currency. Is it any wonder rivals worry that it is trying to reshape the open web in its own image?
Google’s vision of the post-cookie world preserves a surprising amount of the old. Importantly, the tracking of internet users as they browse the web in Chrome will not end. What will change is that the data will no longer be fed into the ad-tech supply chain, where it is in danger of leaking. Instead, it will stay in a user’s own browser. The “signal” from the data will be extracted and aggregated with other similar users to create “cohorts” that can be sold to advertisers as a group.
It may be more secure, but for users it means the experience of online advertising will not change. Messages will still be tied closely to your web-browsing habits, and they will still follow you around from site to site.
This sets up a world of conflicting privacy visions and business interests. Apple’s Safari and the Firefox browser have turned their faces against tracking, and are instead likely to accept personal identifiers for ad targeting, such as the one being developed by ad-tech company The Trade Desk. Google, on the other hand, has signalled that it will reject identifiers and keep its own version of tracking.
Not surprisingly, the risk that Google will rebuild the world of online advertising around its own interests has some regulators feeling nervous. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is looking into the plan, warning that it makes the browser a “bottleneck”. The devil will be in the detail. Will Google gain any informational advantage from being able to create the user cohorts? And will its ownership of the browser enable it to channel more business to its other services?
Even if these worries are unfounded, Google will have designed a system that reflects its own powerful interests. When you use its search engine to look for shoes, for instance, Google will still be able to serve you with Nike ads — delivered through the new cohorts — as you visit other sites around the web.
And behind it all, Google will still have an unrivalled trove of information on users of its own services that will be free of the limitations placed around the handling of third-party data. It all adds up to a fortress of data that could come to seem even more impregnable after the demise of the third-party cookie.
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