Google will stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing

The decision, which comes from the world’s largest digital advertising company, could help keep the industry away from using such individualized tracking, which has been increasingly criticized by privacy lawyers and faces scrutiny. regulators.

Google’s height means that its move will also provoke a backlash from competitors in digital advertising, where many companies rely on tracking people to target their ads, measure their effectiveness, and stop fraud. Google accounted for 52 percent of last year’s global digital advertising spending of $ 292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital advertising consulting firm.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to meet people’s growing concerns about their privacy and how their personal identities are used, we risk the future of free and open internet,” said David Temkin, Google’s leading product manager. change, he said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Google already announced last year that it will eliminate the most used such tracking technology, called third-party cookies, in 2022. But now the company says it will not build alternative tracking technologies or use those developed by other entities to replace third-party cookies with their own ad buying tools.

Instead, Google says its ad buying tools will use the new technologies it has developed with others in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about people on multiple sites. web sites. Such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their own devices and allows advertisers to target aggregate groups of users with similar interests, or ‘cohorts’, rather than individual users. Google said in January that it intends to begin open testing of the purchase using the technology in the second quarter.

Google’s abandonment of individualized tracking on multiple sites has the potential to reshape the industry, given the market power of its ad buying tools. About 40 percent of the money coming back from advertisers to open internet publishers – that is, the part of digital advertising outside of closed systems like Google Search, YouTube or Facebook – goes through Google ad buying tools, according to Jounce.

Google says its announcement on Wednesday does not cover its advertising tools and unique identifiers for mobile apps, only for websites. But its plan is the latest sign that the wave could activate user tracking on a larger scale.

Apple Inc. is pursuing its own plans to limit tracking of application usage, requiring developers to obtain user registration permission before collecting an iPhone ID. At the same time, privacy regulators in the European Union have made several complaints about the information that websites share with third parties about the content that users view as part of such a follow-up.

A set of complaints comes from Brave Software Inc., the maker of a privacy-focused web browser, where Google Temkin was product manager until last summer. Google says Mr Temkin’s involvement in its plan demonstrates its commitment to user privacy. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google’s changes are happening as major technology companies face multiple antitrust investigations. Smaller digital ad companies that use cross-site tracking have accused Apple and Google of using privacy as a pretext for changes that affect competitors. And Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a January call that “Apple has every incentive to use its dominant position on the platform to interfere with how apps and other apps work.” .

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority, the country’s main antitrust regulator, launched a formal investigation last month into Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. The survey was the result of a complaint from a group of merchants who claimed that Google’s plan would strengthen the company’s importance in the online advertising space.

A Google spokesman said the company informed the UK CMA of its plan to end its use of single-track tracking on multiple websites.

Google’s ad complicates the advertising industry’s efforts to come up with alternative, more privacy-friendly technology to target individual consumers, such as the Leadership for Responsible Media Partnership, a group of advertisers, and advertising technology companies. , which would be based on new identifiers, such as strings of numbers and letters derived from users’ email addresses. Without directly mentioning the partnership’s effort, Mr Temkin referred to identifiers “based on people’s email addresses” as examples of tools that Google will not use.

Google has acknowledged that other companies may continue with other ways to track users. Companies that use parts of Google’s advertising infrastructure, such as ad sharing, could still sell ads that use their own unique identifiers, Google said. But the company said it would not use or invest in such tools for the ads it sells.

“We realize that this means that other providers can provide a level of user identity for tracking ads on the web, which we will not do,” Mr. Temkin wrote in the blog post. “We do not believe that these solutions will meet consumers’ growing expectations for privacy, nor will they withstand rapidly evolving regulatory constraints.”

There are exceptions to the Google plan. The company’s limitation for unique tracking identifiers does not extend to so-called primary data – information that a company receives directly from a customer. For example, websites will only be able to sell ads based on user activity on that specific site.

It also means that Google will continue to allow advertisers to target ads on Google services, such as YouTube, to certain customers for whom they already have contact information. But when the changes take effect, Google will no longer target such ads to those people when browsing other websites.

Nestlé SA, a large advertiser that Google informed about the changes, said it welcomed the initiative for privacy reasons.

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

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