Google's policy that improves privacy and limits advertising

Google announced on March 3 its policy that it will eliminate the cookies that record the browsing habits of users. This means a big change for online advertising and for privacy, limiting information to a certain extent for targeted advertising and improving user privacy.

This new policy does not mean that Google will stop collecting user data, much less that it will stop using user data to target ads with Google Ads. What Google will stop doing is selling targeted web ads according to users' browsing habits, in addition to the fact that the Chrome browser will block third-party cookies that collect this information from 2022 through "Privacy Sandbox", but it should be remembered that Safari and Firefox has already enforced this type of policy for years.

How does this new Google policy affect online advertising?

This decision will have enormous implications for the online advertising industry, which according to InfoAndex in 2020 came to dominate the volume of investment in advertising . This succulent market that already surpasses television, has been limited with this new Google policy. Advertising companies that rely on these types of cookies have to find another way to analyze user data in order to properly segment ads.

Although this is probably not a problem for Google itself, which internally will continue to track and segment the behavior within its own platforms to the 4.39 billion active users .

Google proposes a new advertising technology based on "privacy first" and "interest-based", which is where Google's “Privacy Sandbox technology for interest-based advertising ( FLoC )” comes into play . With FLoC, Chrome will track users' browsing habits, and then place it in various audiences, or "cohorts," based on those habits. Thus, advertising campaigns can continue to segment by these cohorts, rather than individual users.

So Google will technically continue to offer targeted ads, but it will do so in a more anonymous and less targeted way. In this way, according to Google, advertising campaigns will be able to obtain almost the same result with FLoC as with the use of cookies based on user tracking.

How does this new Google policy affect privacy?

Google will continue to collect your data from its platforms, that is, what you do when you are using its products, such as YouTube or Google Search, and may generate ads based on this information.

With this measure, Google intends to put an end to a problem that programmatic advertising is experiencing, user privacy and shows the difficult struggle involved in changing the current online advertising model regarding the protection of user data. Users demand greater privacy, as well as control over transparency, control and choice over the use of their data.

From my point of view, it seems like a proposal that balances the balance between an effective advertising system from the point of view of online advertising and, above all, greater user privacy. Additionally, users will also continue to have the option of detecting fraudulent behavior or removing and reporting inappropriate content.

Conclusion

Although user data has been the source of income for these types of companies to date, many large internet companies are positioning privacy as one of their main values, just as Apple has been applying this type of anti-tracing policy. And the most important thing is that this does not mean that online marketing will be affected accordingly, it will simply reformulate its techniques to continue offering quality segmentations while maintaining the privacy of users.