Finders Keepers/Jeepers Creepers
Last year, an unknown user on Twitter went viral for a series of tweets (now deleted) on how his iPhone was tracking him using SDKs on a smartphone. The phone knew that he was apparently a twenty-something unemployed pothead who lived off his parents money, mostly spent buying expensive shoes and clothes. The antagonized phone allegedly began targeting luxury items at him, hinted at from mere conversations with his friends and innocent online searches, leading him to throw a series of accusations about how his software was spying on him. His crime? Cookies. His innocent internet searches and online sign-up forms had left behind a huge digital trail of all his information — as he consensually entered them into websites and applications — allowing his data to be openly shared and distributed for market consumption. And how did that information get stored? Because his browser — as any of ours would — had tied him to a tracker, more commonly known as cookies.
But guess what, all cookies leave crumbs…
Convenient as it is to have all of your stored information at the click of a mouse (it’s actually called a trackpad, genius), it’s not necessarily the safest way to disseminate user information. As a user, your privacy isn’t as contained as you like to believe it is. As a result of cookies and your authorized preferences, the information you enter into applications and websites is distributed around to various marketers to identify you as an individual with likes, hobbies and preferences and target relevant advertisements towards you. You know those terms and conditions you’re so quick to dismiss? Yeah, maybe take a quick look next time. But that aside, let’s understand the dual impacts on the two most affected parties: users and marketers.
Users Losers?
By banning third-party cookies, the good thing to come out of this is that it protects user privacy. The great irony of this is that we didn’t even know our privacy was being invaded, and yet here it is, being handed back to us by Google. But this is good especially given that many countries are still struggling to create privacy frameworks and legislations that can appropriately support the massive leaps and bounds that tech organizations are making.
But how much do we as users really value our digital privacy? A Forbes study relieved that 90% of consumers found irrelevant business messages to be annoying. Most say that if they want to see ads, they’d rather see relevant ones that align with their interests and their lives, which leaves us in an interesting conundrum. On one hand, we value user privacy and we want to be digitally protected, but when that results in irrelevant advertisements — the source of Google’s profitability — we find ourselves irate. As users, we’ve reached a state of such internet dependency that most of us rely on one-click searches, knowing that our browser has our obscure searches saved somewhere in its pockets. Without these cookies, our web experience might fundamentally change.
Mad over Ads
The natural reaction to this is 1: Users; 0: Ads. Understandable, given that the tantamount concern about third-party cookies pivoted around user privacy and true enough, this move is going to be a bitter one for advertisers and marketers to swallow. Some hefty implications include not being able to track the right data, challenges in pushing relevant messaging to consumers combined with the financial onus to seek out new approaches (such as email marketing) are some skid marks that marketers have to deal with along the digital highway.
Before we assume that this move is going to be a marketer’s bane, we should understand that Google will probably never let that happen. They’ve been developing ‘FLoC’, a Federated Learning of Cohorts, that allows advertisers and marketers to target their products towards a more relevant audience, all — interestingly enough — without having to collect cookies.
It’s fairly simple if you think about it. Advertisers need basic broad strokes data in order to feed relevant advertisements about their services, for which they don’t really need to rely on the specifics provided to them through cookies. FLoC allows for users to be categorized into separate cohorts, divided typically by interests, hobbies and qualities. Once the user’s browsing data is analyzed, the data can be used to further segregate users into more specific cohorts and so on. The advertisers are able to therefore target relevant ads to a relevant audience without the ethical burden of collecting individual information about users, allowing users to maintain anonymity in this crowd-based approach.
What Google has also done in this one fell stroke, is throw a bone to the marketers involved by adding what they call a Privacy Sandbox. The ultimate aim of this initiative is to ensure that browsing the web is a more user-friendly experience and is private without compromising on the support that this data lends to publishers. Naturally, this doesn’t seem like a permanent solution but it’s evident that this is the beginning of a more permanent change to web browsing as we know it.
