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Google is weaning itself off of user tracking “cookies” which allow the web giant to serve personalized advertisements but which have also raised the hack of privacy advocates.
Last month, Google unveiled test results showing an alternative to the long-standing tracking practice, saying it could improve online privacy while allowing advertisers to deliver relevant messages.
“This approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private in the browser,” Chetna Bindra, Google Product Manager, explained at the unveiling of the system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).
“The results indicate that when it comes to generating interest-based audiences, FLoC can provide an effective surrogate signal for third-party cookies.”
Google plans to start testing the FLoC approach with advertisers later this year with its Chrome browser.
“Advertising is essential to keeping the web open to everyone, but the web ecosystem is at risk if privacy practices don’t keep up with changing expectations,” Bindra added.
Google has a lot of incentives for change. The US internet giant has been criticized by critics for user privacy and is keenly aware of trends in legislation protecting people’s rights to data.
Growing fear of cookie tracking prompted support for internet rights law like GDPR in Europe and led the internet giant to devise a way to effectively target ads without knowing too much about an individual person.
– ‘Privacy nightmare’ –
Certain types of cookies – which are text files stored when a user visits a website – are convenient for logging in and browsing frequently visited sites.
Anyone who has opened an online registration page only for their name and address to be entered automatically if necessary has cookies to thank. But other types of cookies are considered by some to be harmful.
“Third-party cookies are a privacy nightmare,” Bennet Cyphers, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AFP.
“You don’t have to know what everyone else has done to offer them an ad.”
He believed that context-based advertising can be effective; for example, someone who looks at recipes on a cooking website and sees advertisements for cookware or grocery stores.
Safari and Firefox browsers have already removed third-party cookies, but they are still used by the world’s most popular browser, Chrome.
Chrome made up 63% of the global browser market last year, according to StatCounter.
“It’s both a competitive and a legal responsibility for Google to continue to use third-party cookies, but they want their advertising activity to keep humming,” Cyphers said.
Cyphers and others are concerned that Google is using a secret formula to group Internet users together and assign them “cohort” badges that will be used to target marketing messages without knowing exactly who they are.
“It is possible that this will exacerbate many privacy concerns,” Cyphers said, suggesting the new system could create “cohort” badges of people who could be targeted with little transparency.
“There’s a machine learning black box that’s going to take whatever you’ve even done in your browser and spit out a tag that says you’re that kind of person,” Cyphers said.
“Advertisers will decode the meaning of these labels.”
He expected advertisers to eventually deduce which labels include certain ages, genders or races, and which are people prone to extreme political views.
A business coalition of open web marketers is campaigning against Google’s cohort movement, questioning its effectiveness and saying it will force more advertisers into its “walled garden.”
“Google’s proposals are bad for independent media owners, bad for independent advertising technology and bad for marketers,” Coalition Director James Rosewell said in a statement.
gc / rl
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