By Juanique Tennant

Tech giant Google has announced that it will begin phasing out the sale of ads using an individual’s web tracking data.

The move is to make it explicitly clear that once the ad-tracking third party cookies are removed from Chrome browsers come early 2022, alternative identifiers will not be built to track individuals as they browse
across the web, nor will they be using them in their products.

The news comes after the company announced last year that it would be putting an end to third-party cookie tracking in 2022 – a decision that has left many marketers and digital advertisers grappling for a sense of direction as to how they would be able to target consumers with digital advertising in the near future.

Despite this, David Temkin, director of product management, ads privacy and trust at Google, is arguing that as the industry “has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies” which has led to an “erosion of trust”.

To further support his argument of user trust erosion, Temkin cites a study conducted by Pew Research Center, which found that “72 per cent of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81 per cent say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits”.

Recognising that if digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy, the future of the web will be put at risk, Temkin states that Chrome has taken the decision to work alongside the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox (an initiative to find a solution that protects user privacy and lets content remain freely available on the web) “to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers”.