Ugh, okay, so - yes, use Firefox, of course.
But this is implying that Google’s “controversial new ad targeting tech” is worse than what came before, when it ... just isn’t. By pretty much any measure, it’s an improvement.
The ecosystem for online targeted advertising has developed to target individual IDs. Historically, advertisers have relied on “third-party cookies”, which are little bits of code, to track users around the internet and target them as individuals. These cookies contain or can be linked back to PII (personally identifying) data, which is why they have been deemed to infringe on consumers’ privacy: in order for an advertiser to target you, fragments your personal information would have been shared between hundreds of parties in a matter of seconds.
Now, third-party cookies are going away. Google made certain of that by promising to remove them from Chrome by 2023. There are selfish reasons for this - removing cookies will increase advertisers’ reliance on walled gardens, such as the Google ad network - but nonetheless, most would agree this is a step in the right direction. It means that the heydey of unrestricted sharing of consumer data in the name of targeted advertising is ending: there will still be targeted advertising and sharing of data, but with a lot more restrictions. Now, the ad industry is scrambling to figure out how we still do targeted advertising in a world without an unlimited pool of third-party data to draw from (and yes, it would be nice if we could live in a world without targeted advertising at all, but unfortunately it is still very much the basis for the entire ad-funded internet).
So, what is this “controversial new ad targeting tech” that Google is testing? Well, firstly, this article looks to be a year old, in which time Google have actually made changes in response to criticism to make their solution more privacy-safe. The current solution is called Topics, but in 2021 when the article came out, it was called FLoC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts.
The underlying idea is: instead of sharing consumers’ individual data and targeting them as individuals - get an algo to find patterns in consumers’ online behaviour, group them into cohorts with similar characteristics, share the classification logic that describes these cohorts instead of sharing data, and target them at the cohort-level, not the individual-level. So this means that, in theory, Google is no longer targeting you as an individual as per the old cookie-based method, and is not sharing your personal data around. Instead it’s assigning users into groups or cohorts based on their behaviours - like, i dunno, “travel enthusiasts” or something - and giving advertisers the ability to target those groups. But crucially, without exchanging any personal identifiers about consumers.
And look, obviously it would be nice if advertising didn’t exist at all, and no-one likes the thought that Google is modelling your behaviour and classifying you into groups... but like. If you use Chrome or other Google products then Google has all this data about you anyway. The amount of data Google has about you hasn’t changed... this way they are just sharing less of that data with other parties.
I’m not some big Google stan or anything, but the original post is just scaremongering and totally lacking in context. FLoC/Topics isn’t a perfect solution by any means - nor will it be the only solution for cookieless advertising - but it’s a small step forward.
But yeah use Firefox obv.
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