Google to Stop Selling Ads Based on Browsing History
The Claim
Google plans to stop selling ads based on a person's browsing history and will no longer use ad tools that track individuals across websites.
Emerging story
On March 3rd, 2021, The Wall Street Journal tweeted that “Google plans to stop selling ads based on a person's browsing history and will no longer use ad tools that track individuals across websites.”
The story was picked up by news sites like CNBC, engadget, and others. Some social media users were skeptical of this announcement.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation found this claim to be true. Google announced in a blog post on March 3rd that they are aiming to end third-party cookies and any technology used for tracking individual people as they browse the web.
The blog post, written by David Temkin, Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust, explains that “as our industry has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies. This has led to an erosion of trust.”
He cites a study by Pew Research Center that found “72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits.”
Temkin confirmed that Google is phasing out third-party cookies, used to monitor which websites are visited by each user. They do not plan to replace third-party cookies with any alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse the web. This could be a concern for advertisers, as they rely on targeted data gathered by these cookies to show their ads to the most relevant internet users. Google mentions that one way to preserve the privacy of individuals while maintaining relevancy for advertisers is to “hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests.”
The original announcement that Google would end support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser was in January 2020, stating that this would take place within 2 years. So we can expect to see third-part cookies phased out by January 2022.
