A Privacy-First Web
A recent post on the Google Ads & Commerce Blog called “Charting a Course Toward a more Privacy-First Web” has everyone talking at work.
The piece was written by David Temkin, Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust at Google. (A tough, but probably fascinating job!)
Temkin’s thesis is that advertising is the economic foundation of the information-rich internet that we enjoy everyday.
But as the advertising industry strove to deliver better and more-relevant ads to consumers, it proliferated a technology (third party cookies, 3PC) that is not good for consumer privacy and is now used by a marketplace of literally thousands of companies.
This has led to erosion of consumer trust with more-than 80% of consumers saying that the risks of data collection outweigh the benefits of an open web itself, according to a study from Pew Research Center.
Temkin argues, if the industry doesn’t course-correct away from 3PCs, the web as we know it is at risk.
Google’s efforts to pivot in this space are pretty well known to most of its millions of customers. Chrome is working on developing new standards via a Privacy Sandbox, shared with key players from the ad tech and digital marketing industry to ensure buy-in and scale.
Temkin doesn’t underplay the risk to Google itself, because if other businesses continue to develop PII graphs based on email addresses and 3PCs, the risk is still there. And Google’s business depends on a free and open web.
Temkin’s go-to “effective alternatives” are FLoCs and first-party relationships.
FLoCs (federated learning of cohorts, one of the Privacy Sandbox technologies) mix individuals within large groups of people with shared interests to anonymize them yet permit the relevance signals needed for a good marketing experience.
First-party relationships (direct relationships between web browsers and the sites they are visiting) may mean the continuation of cookies (1PCs, not 3PCs) but eliminates the profit-motive for third parties to amass and sell other people’s data.
Temkin’s piece shows a better path forward.
Will we take it?
There are many in the marketing industry (myself included) who feel a small resentment that Google, who profited massively from the use of 3PCs in their supply-side and demand-side programmatic advertising businesses, is now out to “pull the ladder up”.
But net net this seems the right direction to go, and Google has the mass to make it move.
Doing a lot of good is the best way to get past a little resentment.
Read Temkin's full post here.
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web
