Rivals are also concerned that Google, which has said other parts of its business like YouTube will adhere to these changes, still has a basic advantage through the sheer amount of existing data it has on users. In the UK the Competition and Markets Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office are looking at the proposals, from a competition and privacy perspective (ie are there disadvantages for Google’s rivals in provision of online adverts and will users’ data be abused). The topics are deleted every three weeks. Google said the topics will not include sensitive categories such as gender or race and the system will allow users to see the topics, remove any they don’t like or disable the feature completely. Then when users visit a site that has signed up to the system, three of the user’s “topics” of interest are shared with the site and its advertisers, allowing the site to serve ads that reflect the user’s interest in, for instance, rock music or cars. Advertisers and publishers are able to access this data via a browser API, which is a feed of information that they can tap into. It is called Topics, in which the Chrome browser notes your top interests for that week based on your browsing history and registers them in the browser (like a cookie would) under broad categories like “fitness” or “travel”, which are limited in number. This was called FLoC, for Federated Learning of Cohorts.Īfter feedback from the industry, which included warnings that individuals could still be identified as they browsed across the web under the FLoC system, Google is now proposing a different system. The initial plan was to bundle people into groups (cohorts) with similar interests based on their browsing habits and allow advertisers to serve ads to those groups. Google is replacing third party cookies with a set of technologies called a privacy sandbox and last week it announced it was changing one of the key proposals. Apple and Mozilla have blocked third party cookies on their Safari and Firefox browsers and Google is doing the same on Chrome by 2023. This is in part due to pressure from regulators and pro-privacy laws like GDPR. In what appears to be a win for privacy advocates and a blow to publishers, advertisers and the intermediaries that facilitate personalised ads across the web, third party cookies are being phased out across the board. Like other news publishers, the Guardian asks readers if it can use cookies, for purposes such as measuring how often readers visit and use our site, and showing readers personalised ads. Third party cookies, through agreements with multiple publishers and websites, are able to create a profile of individual users and serve targeted adverts to you while you browse across multiple websites. If you check the cookie consent box on any website, you will be surprised at the number of advertising and marketing-related cookies. However, there are types of this technology known as third party cookies that facilitate the storing of information (like your browsing history and your location) by commercial partners – often marketing or advertising businesses – that might make you slightly more uncomfortable. This sort of thing is known as a first party cookie. Some of this info is helpful, like whether you have logged in to the site before, so you don’t have to constantly enter your user name and password every time you visit in the future. “That’s not a very effective way of rebalancing the power relationship between consumers and companies that profit from consumers’ data,” he said.Ĭookies identify individual users so the website can record all kinds of things about your activity. The new head of the UK’s data watchdog, John Edwards, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week – on international data privacy day – that he is no fan of the consent-clicking process. In the UK and EU, you are asked to consent to multiple cookies when you click on a site (and yes it’s worth checking just how many cookies you agree to take on when you give your consent). Put simply, a cookie is a text file that is dropped into your browser by a website when you visit it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |