Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, who has just decided to make it easier for advertisers to navigate Internet users.
Photographer: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg All of Google’s technology decisions are closely scrutinized by companies whose business depends largely on the giant of Mountain View. And the latest announcement should not delight advertisers and advertisers’ marketing departments. Google has just revealed that it was now giving itself two years to remove from its browser “cookies” from websites, these small electronic identification modules that follow you on the internet to better target advertising and denounced by activists of protection of privacy. The web giant said its “Privacy Sandbox” program launched in August would still allow advertisers to deliver targeted messages, while preventing people from being tracked by these “cookies” when using the Google Chrome browser. The aim is to make “cookies” from third-party sites (which do not come from the browser used but from the site visited) “obsolete” within “two years,” said Justin Schuh of Chrome Engineering in a blog post.
- These small tracers, installed automatically when you visit a website, are used to identify a user, to save their preferences but also to establish their profile and to know if they have seen or clicked on an advertisement. Their use is denounced by supporters of privacy, but defended by developers of free online services who survive on the advertising revenue they generate. The move comes as tech giants, who have faced data leaks for several years, face toughening regulations on online privacy, such as the implementation in Europe of general data protection regulations (GDPR). In France, the association UFC-Que Choisir also sues Google for violating the GDPR.
“He must, like the others, submit to the law and very clearly ask consumers for authorization to use their personal data, which is far from being the case”, explained Raphaël Bartolomé, head of the legal department of ‘UFC- Que Choisir, in June 2019. Read also – Tinder and Grindr would cash with advertisers access to the sexual orientation of their users’ Make the web more private’ “Our goal with this open source initiative (including codes are accessible to all, note) is to make the web more private and secure for users, while supporting publishers, “said Justin Schuh. Blocking cookies altogether is not a good solution for the American giant, who fears that this will encourage even more insidious tracking methods. Google has not specified what it intends to replace these third-party “cookies”, but said “to work actively” so that developers and publishers have the opportunity to experiment with new mechanisms. It remains to be seen whether the phasing out of these trackers will give Google more control over its online advertising, a sector it currently dominates alongside Facebook.
Indeed, Google’s decision may encourage advertisers to use their own first-hand data, such as login information or email addresses, to target advertising and spend on data measurement, including understood, of course, Google’s technology. Google could also offer advertisers its own audience segments based on data collected from its search engine, Gmail, YouTube, application downloads and visits to publisher sites that serve ads through Google. So it’s not necessarily good news for advertisers and small and medium-sized publishers who may be even more dependent on Google – with the risk of reaching larger but less relevant audiences – or who will have to find other ways to target internet users. Here’s why Disney theme parks are so expensive.