How Google will target ads after opting out of cookies

It's no secret that Facebook, Google and other advertisers use cookies to track people as they interact with websites—and thus build profiles of them to target ads.

Just recently, Google announced that it would stop using third-party cookies to track people online. Instead, the company plans to develop ways to target ads without collecting personal data.

Google will continue to track users and use the information for targeting within its ecosystem. But Google's move away from third-party cookies will make it harder for other companies that rely on user history to serve ads.

Google plans to use several new methods of collecting information for advertising: 

• Creating groups of users with similar interests. This will allow advertisers to target the target audience without knowing about each user separately.
• Local storage of user data.
• Create an anonymous profile of the user's interests in Google Chrome, which will be used to display relevant advertising.

To create such a system, Google and its partners are developing new projects under the general name Privacy Sandbox. These are several standards that will allow online advertising to exist and work as it does now, but without infringing on user privacy related to cookies. 

One of the most notable technologies is the FLoC web standard. This is a standard that creates interest groups locally in the browser without sending individual data to the server. When a page wants to display an ad, it will request it based on the cohort the user was placed in, rather than based on their specific browsing history.

Another proposed standard is FLEDGE. It will allow advertisers to create "custom audiences" without the cookies that enable that capability today. Custom audiences allow advertisers to target previous visitors to a website, a practice called retargeting. 

This will allow advertisers to use retargeting and target past site visits, but will require less data to create user profiles.

All of these standards make it clear that Google is finally starting to push for improvements to online privacy. A big reason for Google's sudden interest in privacy is that its business is under threat.

Last March, Apple announced that it would block tracking cookies by default in Safari on iOS and macOS, which meant advertisers suddenly couldn't track people using those products online almost overnight. Google risks losing users who are increasingly privacy conscious. 

Luckily for Google, it develops the world's most popular desktop browser and can more or less single-handedly pioneer new ad targeting systems. Although the company has proposed its designs as web standards for general adoption, it is unclear whether other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari plan to implement the core standards.

However, advertisers and publishers, such as the BBC, New York Times, and Facebook, actively participate in meetings dedicated to the new standards. Introducing publishers to new technologies that support their advertising business models can make it easier to implement them in other browsers. 

By implementing these new web standards, Google is ensuring that it can continue to sell targeted advertising while also promoting online privacy. Targeting will still use user data in some way, and there will always be loopholes for abuse, just as there have been with cookies for decades.

Google's proposals aim to improve online privacy and tame the "Wild West of trackers." They still allow publishers and authors to get paid for their work - as opposed to completely demonizing advertising as a legitimate business model.

It may be an imperfect fix, but it's not certain that the internet we know and love can continue to exist without something like this.