Cologne The advertising industry on the Internet must irrevocably adjust to the end of tracking with the help of cookies. Google’s top manager Matt Brittin made this clear on Wednesday at the DMEXCO advertising fair in Cologne. “The transition to a world without third-party cookies means that we have to rethink the technology on which much of the online advertising system is based,” said Brittin, who is responsible for Google’s business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is necessary to develop new solutions in which data protection is in the foreground.
Cookies are small files that a browser stores on the computer or smartphone. Because cookies often contain unique identifiers, websites can use them to recognize their visitors. So-called third-party cookies are not set by the visited website itself, but by embedded content from other sites. In this way, advertising service providers can track users across different pages.
“Third-party cookies are a technology that is increasingly being abused,” Brittin told the German Press Agency. The users found some of the advertisements to be intrusive and disturbing and increasingly used ad blockers. “An ad blocker is a crude tool that makes it difficult to finance content because everything is blocked.“
Brittin rejected a complete renunciation of personalized advertising, because it jeopardizes the existence of the free, advertising-financed web. “The Internet Advertising Bureau has found in a study that the conversion from personalized to non-personalized advertising could cost 39 billion euros a year.“
Alternative concept “Topics”
Brittin referred to an alternative concept called “Topics”, in which the browser itself creates an interest profile without passing on data to advertisers that could be used for concrete identification. “We are providing new technology that enables users to see relevant ads without compromising their privacy or being tracked across websites.“
At the same time, Brittin made it clear that there will be no further grace period for the acceptance of third-party cookies. Google had already announced at the beginning of 2020 that it would phase out the support of advertising cookies in its own browser, Chrome. After protests from the advertising industry, this deadline was extended to the “second half of 2024”. That date is fixed, he said.
At the DMEXCO in Cologne, Google announced two more new tools to enable privacy-friendly advertising. The “Google Ads Privacy Hub” is intended to help advertisers understand new privacy-friendly advertising solutions. The second tool is aimed at users: “My Ads Center” is intended to give users more control over the ads they want to see on YouTube, in Google search and on Discover. In this section you can choose which ads you want to see and which you don’t.
