Google will stop personalized ads and tracking

[Drama Lama]

Introduction ( by me )

Google had once the slogan: Don't be evil . at some point they dropped the slogan and have now become one of the biggest online tracking companies.

 

Today the Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust David Tempkin made a Blog Post-  in which he told that Google will stop peronalizing ads and the tracking of users

 

 

He begins with a statement almost all probably would agree on:

Quote

It’s difficult to conceive of the internet we know today — with information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people — without advertising as its economic foundation

 

Quote

72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center

he also told that they will stop working on alternatives to cookie-tracking, unlik previous reports about Google working on alternatives to tracking by cookies

Quote

Even so, we continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers.

Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

 

He gave a plan about new privacy features

Quote

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.

My thoughts

With growing pressure from governments and consumers this seems like a logical step but I didn't think they'd go so far so immediatly. And I'm wondering if there's a catch but if this seems legit and honest i'm pretty happy that this might be the beginning of a new internet age without tracking

I don't have a problem with ads But I have a problem with tracking.

And the question remains wether others will follow or all the websites switch to ads from networks that still do tracking.

 

Sources

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/

 

sources are all german:

https://www.dw.com/de/google-will-cookie-tracking-abschaffen/a-56763276

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/google-stoppt-personalisierte-werbung-101.html

 

sorry I accidentally posted it before it was ready written.

I also appologize if the quality is not good enough. I wanted to get it out as fast as possible and will try to improove it

Edited March 3, 2021 by Drama Lama

[gloop]

[IkeaGnome]

We'll see what they do instead to create revenue. At the end of the day, we're still the product.

 

Here's a couple links in case you're still trying to find more

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/541377-google-to-stop-tracking-users-for-targeted-ads

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021

https://deadline.com/2021/03/google-chrome-tracking-browsing-history-to-sell-advertising-1234705678/

[Drama Lama]

5 minutes ago, Voluspa said:

We'll see what they do instead to create revenue. At the end of the day, we're still the product.

 

Here's a couple links in case you're still trying to find more

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/541377-google-to-stop-tracking-users-for-targeted-ads

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021

https://deadline.com/2021/03/google-chrome-tracking-browsing-history-to-sell-advertising-1234705678/

thanks one of the sources contains a link to the blog post

[The_russian]

Not sure why it hasn't already been posted, but here's the blog post from Google:

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/

 

And for those that skimmed the articles, read that Google announced early last year that they were going to get rid of third party cookies and are wondering why this is now in the news, as far as I can tell up until now all Google said was that they would be getting rid of third party cookies, the new addition is that they will not be creating alternate methods to track people. 

[trag1c]

In more recent news Google has announced its new revenue stream... the human power cell. 

[Drama Lama]

4 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Sad reality is that some people will believe that kind of bs...

it absolutely looks to good to be true.

Why would they give up a huge growing part of their business? No company would do that.

and even if Google is serious about this all the millions of websites will swithc to similar companies like google that will continue tracking.

[BuckGup]

Bullshit 

Or like others have said that Google has found a new more profitable revenue source. Which I actually might believe at this point

 

 

 

 

Edited March 3, 2021 by BuckGup
Damn the poop emoji looks like shit on the forum. No like actually shit as it's the twitter poop and not Apple

[Drama Lama]

3 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

There are way too many of them.

number of stars in the universe < number of different trackers on websites

[Drama Lama]

another big question remains: What will happen with all the information already collected?

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, Drama Lama said:

another big question remains: What will happen with all the information already collected?

Google will auction it off to the NSA.

[Drama Lama]

Just now, FakeKGB said:

Google will auction it off to the NSA.

to @FakeNSA?

[Drama Lama]

It‘s March the 3. not April first right?

[The_russian]

25 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Google will auction it off to the NSA.

Bold of you to assume the NSA doesn't already have the info

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah ok, also I'll always find it funny those that actually believed in their slogan.

[matrix07012]

Good, but someone else will

[Arika]

"we're just telling you we aren't going to track you anymore.... We're still going to do it secretly though" 

[Fasterthannothing]

They said they won't track you with cookies. That's because now they embed invisible tracking pixels into things like marketing emails or ads to track people with. We are using it at work right now. 

[tikker]

1 hour ago, SlidewaysZ said:

They said they won't track you with cookies. That's because now they embed invisible tracking pixels into things like marketing emails or ads to track people with. We are using it at work right now. 

Exactly lol.

 

They already have your profile based on so many other things, they probably haven't even needed cookies for a while. They've just found the ultimate way and want to distract us by getting rid of cookies.

[Delicieuxz]

5 hours ago, FakeKGB said:

Google will auction it off to the NSA.

People should assume the NSA and CIA have been receiving all of it all along, directly from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, as well as through other methods, with all of it being compiled into virtual profiles of each person that gives the US government a god-view over all society.

 

If it can be done, it is being done. And this can be easily done, and the tech companies which would be involved in it being done all have favourable big money-making relationships with the government agencies which would be wanting to do this. Not that government agencies can't figure-out how to get the data on their own.

 

6 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

Introduction ( by me )

Google had once the slogan: Don't be evil . at some point they dropped the slogan and have now become one of the biggest online tracking companies.

 

Today the Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust David Tempkin made a Blog Post-  in which he told that Google will stop peronalizing ads and the tracking of users

 

 

He begins with a statement almost all probably would agree on:

 

he also told that they will stop working on alternatives to cookie-tracking, unlik previous reports about Google working on alternatives to tracking by cookies

 

He gave a plan about new privacy features

My thoughts

With growing pressure from governments and consumers this seems like a logical step but I didn't think they'd go so far so immediatly. And I'm wondering if there's a catch but if this seems legit and honest i'm pretty happy that this might be the beginning of a new internet age without tracking

I don't have a problem with ads But I have a problem with tracking.

 

I would be extremely cautious about their claims. When a campaign or activity becomes too dirty in the public's perception, it's common that associations with it are burned / wiped while a new one that will remain discrete or whitewashed in the public's perception for a long time takes its place.

 

The writing is on the wall for data-tracking, with the more that people and governments (other than the US') become aware of what it is, the more they oppose it, investigate it, and create legislation against it. And some tech companies, like DuckDuckGo, Apple, EFF,  are also fighting against it and exposing the falsehoods of those who benefit from it. If tech companies don't ostensibly wipe their hands of it, they will bring increasingly more oversight and regulation of their practices.

 

 

The Google press release doesn't say that Google will stop personalizing ads, but that they have methods to deliver personalized ads without using individual identifiers. As Google's press release says, they have developed alternative methods which are comparatively effective at delivering targeted advertising as tracking. In order to be able to deliver targeted ads, they still have to know something about the activities of the person browsing a website. How do they do that?

 

Google's press release also stresses aggregation and anonymization of data. So, there's still data based on people's activities. And it's been said that any anonymous data can be de-anonymized.

 

Full disclosure and examination of whatever new methods Google plans to rely on is needed. In the end, it might not be all that different for internet browsers. But it sounds to me like Google's idea is to offload more of the processing and anonymization of the data onto users' devices, so that when the data is sent to Google, it is already anonymous - but that the same data-harvesting will be occurring.

 

 

"Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers"

 

It sounds like Google specifically mentions doing the data-processing and anonymizing on people's devices, which would mean people's device performance suffers and that there could be storages of data which hackers, including government ones [2] [3], could exploit. Maybe a virus could be made that causes devices to perpetually send data not just to Google, but to other sources - and maybe without the data being anonymized.

 

 

Unilateral and discrete data-harvesting is fundamentally an immoral and already-criminal (if people would just wake-up and realize it) business that is built upon the theft of what is other people's property, for the purpose of preying on and manipulating people through dirty covert deals with 3rd-parties (including governments, police, advertisers, etc).

 

Corporations using your devices to process data which they then send to themselves for commercial purposes would be like you running a Bitcoin-mining operation on their systems without permission. It is still theft of the use of your devices, your hosting of your devices, your electricity, the product of your personal activity (which belongs to you).

[SeriousDad69]

This is what made me uninstall Google Chrome. This FLoC thing they're gonna try basically datamines your browsing history and puts you into advertising categories with other people. It gives me the feeling like pigs being in a separate corral from cows.

Install Brave, Palemoon or Firefox already. (Keep in mind if you install Firefox you have to dig into about:config to actually disable a lot of the telemetry and other crap.)

[Jet_ski]

This might be partly a reaction to Apple’s new iOS policy that you have to opt in for apps to track you. Exactly how much were they tracking us that they rather “end it” than tell us?

 

When the iOS privacy label became mandatory, Google Maps wasn’t updated for a suspiciously long period of time.

[JLO64]

Just to be clear, are they still going to be collecting data from users' Google Accounts?  This might still be a sizable dent in their profits but Google Accounts are so ubiquitous now that they might still be able to focus solely on that as a source of personalized information.

[williamcll]

Rather, they don't need to have personal ads, but instead give everyone the same ads.

 

 

Besides, most if not all of us have adblockers anyway.

[Mihle]

I would like a world where the ads is only based on the website it's placed on, not the person that sees it.