Google search engine
More privacy on the net! Google announced that it would no longer track the search behavior of its users from next year.
On Wednesday, the internet giant Google announced a radical change for the year 2022. This is a change for the better for the users, because: In the future, the search behavior of the users will no longer be tracked. This means that no more data is collected that was previously used to display personalized advertising.
With this step, Google ensures better data protection and more privacy on the Internet.
In a blog post, Google manager David Temkin justified the plans for data protection: “It is obvious that digital advertising must evolve and respond to people's growing concerns about their privacy and the use of their personal identity.” However, Google has come up with a new concept.
The group wants to refrain in the future from selling advertising that is based on the tracking of individual users on various websites. This is a big step for a company that has made it possible to use cookies to track its users every step of the way for years.
“But people shouldn't just have to accept that they are being spied on all over the network in order to get potentially interesting advertisements for them,” Temkin writes in the blog post.
In fact, studies show that 72 percent of all Internet users feel that they are constantly being followed on the Internet. 81 percent even state that the risks of this persecution are greater than the possible benefits they personally derive from it.
However, the move that Google is now taking does not come as a complete surprise. Last year, the Internet group announced that third-party cookies should be completely blocked in their Chrome browser by 2022 at the latest – as has been the case with other browsers such as Firefox or Safari for years.
Now, however, Google is going one step further and promising not to develop an alternative that could replace third-party cookies.
“Once all of the third-party cookies are gone, we will not provide any other identifiers that individuals can track while they browse the Internet,” promises Temkin. However, in order to be able to continue selling advertising, Google will increasingly rely on aggregated and anonymized data of its users.
Cookies are to be replaced in the future by a new technology called “Federated Learning of Cohorts” or FLoC for short. Internet users are grouped into larger groups based on their interests and can be used with advertising on the basis of these groups. The tracking no longer takes place on the basis of the individual but on the whole group.
It should not be overlooked, however, that the new regulation only applies to third-party websites. Google's own products such as Gmail, YouTube or Google search may continue to collect information about their users . In addition, the step will initially only be carried out on websites, not on smartphones. This means that Google itself does not have to reckon with any major losses from this new regulation. The situation is different for advertising companies that previously relied on cookies to distribute their advertising.
