Google has plans to stop targeting ads based on individuals’ browsing habits.
In case you wondered, Google usually targets ads based on what you search. Basically, if you search for a phone the next thing you keep seeing phones all over your timeline and then you wonder if there’s a ghost tracking you? Well, this is where digital marketers come in, they target you based on your interests and Google helps them.
The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.
The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.
Google’s director of product management for ads privacy and trust wrote:
Now, “we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,”
“Instead of user-level identifiers, Google will use “privacy preserving” application programming interfaces that will “still delivering results for advertisers and publishers,” Temkin wrote
Who will it affect?
It’s rather obvious that advertising agencies will now have to figure out how to reach the mass without these targeted ads. They will ultimately have a harder time reaching their audiences because they don’t have access to third-party data or an alternative workaround.