A major slice of revenue of revenue for Alphabet comes via its subsidiary company, Google. Similarly, a significant portion of Google"s revenue comes via search and ads. To accomplish this, the firm uses third-party cookies and trackers to identify user activity across the web, in order to present personalized ads and other suggestions.
However, this is now changing as Google has announced that it will soon stop tracking you on the web.
This follows Google"s announcement from earlier this month that it is phasing out support for third-party cookies. This is a part of the endeavor to make the web privacy-first. To that end, Google has confirmed that once cookies are phased out, it will not be building any identifiers at all to track user activity either across the web or in its products.
The company has clarified that while other competitors may build alternative solutions such as PII graphs based on email addresses, it will not engage in the practice as it"s not likely to meet the demands for user privacy. Instead, it will shift focus to privacy-preserving APIs which still deliver relevant results to advertisers without tracking individuals separately.
Google says that:
Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers. In fact, our latest tests of FLoC show one way to effectively take third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2. Chrome also will offer the first iteration of new user controls in April and will expand on these controls in future releases, as more proposals reach the origin trial stage, and they receive more feedback from end users and the industry.
This points to a future where there is no need to sacrifice relevant advertising and monetization in order to deliver a private and secure experience.
The company notes that it will still work to strengthen connections between customers and brands but these do not have to come at the cost of user privacy. While third-party cookies will be phased out within two years, you can read more about privacy-preserving APIs on GitHub here.