Google promises transparent development of new tracking standards

In recent weeks and months, the data protection practices of the advertising industry have repeatedly made it into daily reports. In order to be as well positioned as possible in the future, this requires new tracking concepts that on the one hand enable the measurement of campaigns, but at the same time respect the privacy of the users.

Yesterday we reported to you about a new approach from Mozilla and Meta, which is still in development, today we want to look at the other spectrum and at a company that lives off user data: Google. Because after you have set the course away from FLoC, you now want to try other methods.

This includes, for example, a procedure called “Topics”, which divides the user into interest groups and offers them ads based on this. The group is dividing all of these new methods into a “privacy sandbox”, which has now been scrutinized by the UK competition authority. The first results give hope.

Because the authority has now accepted Google’s efforts and trusts that the company will not distort competition or favor itself. So far, it is not really public what is behind the “Privacy Sandbox”, but the UK competition authority now wants to monitor the implementation of the same.

This has a major influence on the strategy, because with this step, Google is also committed to developing the standard for everyone from a legal point of view. This includes publishing the development results and passing on test results. In addition, third-party cookies will only be completely deactivated once the new standard is in place.

To ensure this, the competition authority sends a supervisor who will monitor progress and report problems directly in case of doubt. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough, consumer advocates are already warning, despite the agreement, that the search engine company could try to get as much out of it as possible.

Via The Verge