More Online Privacy? It’s About Time!

Have you ever looked at a pair of shoes online one time just to have ads for shoes follow you around on the Internet for the next week? Well I have and I find it to be creepy and it hardly ever gets me to buy anything. This annoyance is caused by a technology called third-party cookies.

If you also find this advertising technique annoying, then good news! Google is going to be phasing out these pesky little cookies in the next year. Despite allowing advertisers and Google itself to gain important information about what users do online after they visit a webpage, these cookies violate privacy.

I know, it sounds too good to be true. That’s because it is, Google still has other ways to track you. Advertisers can still use first-party cookies to track what you do on their website, just not what you do on the rest of the web. They will also continue to use their “Privacy Sandbox”, which they revealed in 2019. This allows google to still target ads, while maintaining privacy for its users. This will include an AI system called Floc, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. This basically means that instead of targeting you individually, Google will now target you based on groups you have similar interests with.

To be honest, I don’t know if this method will be better or worse. The good thing is that it will increase privacy, however, Google will have to be really careful not to group people based on sensitive categories, such as race or sexual orientation.

Since Google’s main form of income is from paid search ads, they will likely not be affected by the removal of third-party ads, it actually might even help them. Other advertisers may rely on third-party cookies, but since Google does not, this move may help them take even more control of the advertising space and the web.

Although this change may benefit users and Google itself, it may harm the advertising business as a whole, and in particular smaller advertising firms who rely on this information. Also, users may not even notice a major difference in privacy. After all, Google is still going to track them.

I guess we will have to wait and see the impact that removing third-party cookies will have. Hopefully we will know more by 2022. I have to admit, I’m excited to see if the targeting on Google will get less annoying and creepy.

What do you think?

Caroline