Updated on 05 March 2021:
Google continues its path to meet users’ privacyexpectations. According to our source: BDM, Google continues to make progress on its “Privacy Sandbox” project.
Its purpose is to remove third-party cookies to preserve the privacy of users’ personal data. It also proposes viable new methods to satisfy advertisers.
Once third-party cookies are removed, any form of individual tracking of users will be stopped.
What about advertisers who want to be able to continue targeting their Ads ads accurately? Testing with advertisers in Google Ads will be started in the second quarter.
Google highlights several alternatives: aggregation, anonymization, local processing or “on device” data.
Google is now focusing its efforts on a group targeting proposal(FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts):
“Our latest tests on FloC have shown that it is possible to remove third-party cookies from the advertising equation to produce effective advertisements, instead hiding individuals within “cohorts”, i.e. large groups of like-minded Internet users.”
Allowing to target collectively rather than individually, FLOcs are based on browsing his or her browsing hiss and similar interests of groups of Internet users.
Cookies, why are they here?
More and more, when you browse the web, sites ask you to “accept cookies” … but what exactly are cookies on the Internet?
Small bits of text inserted into your browser, they were originally a service developed to simplify the interaction between the site and the user and get better use by making the site more intuitive.
Making it much easier to browse the Internet,they personalize your experience on the web and allow your usual sites to recognize you in order to offer you directly more personalized content.
Recording your search habits, sites can adapt to you and cookies save you time by saving your data so you don’t have to retype it with each new use.
Cookies, a double-edged sword?
As you understand, cookies collect and record private information about you and your online activities.
Not very transparent, the sites that use them can follow your browsing actions: what do you read? What article do you spend time on? or: what makes you click on a link…
All this valuable information is collected by the sites and the methods to collect it are increasingly restrictive and sophisticated, so that Internet users no longer know what they can or must accept without compromising the security of their confidential data.
Once all the data is retrieved, the sites combine them and can therefore better target their ads and potentially sell you even more products or services.
Age, sex, location … search engines and websites record a wealth of confidential data.
The different categories of Cookies
Not all cookies have the same utility and are not all necessary to optimize the time you spend on the Internet.
There are 5 categories of cookies:
- Performance cookies:they collect information about how users use the site.
- Strictly necessary cookies:they are essential to the navigation of users on the site and the use of its functions.
- Privacy cookies: Theycan be used to allow the site to keep track of user choices and provide optimized and personalized features.
- Marketing cookies:used to communicate ads that are more tailored to users and their interests.
- Other cookies (third-party cookies): Safari (Apple) and Firefox browsers block third-party cookies by default, but they are still used by Chrome, which accounts for 63% of the market in 2020, according to StatCounter.
The first 3 categories helpoptimize your user experience. For the last 2 categories, the goal is clearly to collect personal information that allows for advertising targeting.
Cookies can be called “persistent” or “session.”
Persistent cookies help websites remember your information and settings when you visit them in the future. This results in faster and more convenient access because, for example, you don’t have to reconnect.
As web pages have no memory, a user moving from one page to another will be treated as a completely new visitor. Session cookies therefore allow the website you visit to track your movements so that you are not asked for the same information you have already provided on previous pages.
Google is looking for an alternative to Cookies
Google has announced that it wants to find a solution to do without cookies without altering the user experience.
Supposed to improve the privacy of Internet users,the Californian group would like to “hide the user in the crowd” so that its browsing history remains confidential in the browser.
This system has been named: Federated Learning of Cohorts(FLoC).
Instead of targeting each user individually, the websites will target audience segments: FLoC,which will contain several hundred or even thousands of people with the same browsing habits.
Google,the world’s leading pay-per-view web-based advertisingcompany, is trying to find an alternative: reassure public opinion,which is increasingly skeptical of cookies, and satisfy its advertising customers who want to continue to have accurate targeting of their ads.
Google plans to open ad buying tests around this technology starting in the second quarter and wantsto stop cookies by 2022.