Google follows Apple… at its own pace
An article in the The Wall Street Journal, “Google plans to curtail cross-app tracking on Android phones”, outlines Alphabet’s plans to provide Android with an app-to-app privacy protection system similar to Apple’s April 2021 initiative, which has hit Facebook and other social networks’ revenue hard, having built much of their business on selling their users’ data.
When Apple launched its App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which allowed users to choose whether or not to allow apps to track their activity on other apps and websites, it found — surprise, surprise — that 96% of people opted not to be harassed by intrusive ads. Overnight, this deprived Facebook of the data it feeds on, which meant that online advertising campaigns in countries such as Japan, the United States, Australia or the United Kingdom where iOS is the predominant operating system suddenly lost their focus.
The thing about Apple is that it sets the trend for the entire industry. Alphabet could not allow its operating system, Android, the most important in the world, to allow its users to be spied on. The development of a similar system was simply a matter of time.
But Alphabet does things differently to Apple: it takes a long time to make changes, a two-year timeframe over which it accepts that Android users will continue to be spied on. That, to some extent…
