Google’s new privacy steps to help users but not impact ad revenue

Digital ads accounted for 43.2% of Google’s total revenue in the third quarter of 2021, according to the company’s earnings reports. Facebook, on the other hand, earned 97% of its global revenue from ads in 2020, according to market research firm Statista.

The scenario in India is not very different. Google India reported a 21.4% year-on-year (y-o-y) growth in gross advertisement revenue to touch ₹13,887 crore, according to filings with the registrar of companies (RoC) in November 2021. In the same period, Facebook’s gross ad revenue rose 41% y-o-y in India to touch ₹9,326 crore.

Apple’s ‘not to track’ feature that has “caused a major dent to Facebook’s ad business” because of its heavy reliance on ad revenue, according to Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg. Early this month, Meta’s chief financial officer, Dave Wehner, too slammed Apple’s privacy changes, alleging it was a major reason the company lost $10 billion in ad revenue during Q4 2021.

Google may not feel the heat as much as Facebook because the difference between Google’s newly-announced privacy measures and Apple’s do not track tool is that users still have to disable tracking manually on Android, according to experts.

“Google introduced a number of changes last year that allowed users to opt out of tracking. However, the difference here is that users had to go to settings and then disable it. However, in Apple’s case, users automatically see a standard prompt seeking their consent,” explained Isha Suri, senior researcher at Centre for Internet and Society.

When you are planning to build a privacy preserving operating system, the changes Apple introduced last year must be examined, Suri pointed out. The iPhone maker introduced a clear interface to opt out of tracking across multiple apps and provided users knowledge of the data that apps are gathering so that they could make more informed decisions.

“It is not yet clear how the latest changes brought by Google will take user preferences into account. The default should be privacy preserving rather than the other way round,” she said.

Google had made similar efforts late last year when it had announced that it would automatically remove the advertising ID of users who opt out of personalized ads, and app developers would only receive a string of zeros instead of an identifier. The new privacy measures will phase out advertising ID and limit sharing of user data with third parties. The advertising ID is used by app developers to measure app usage across all apps and target them with in-app advertisements.

Google’s plans to curb intrusive advertising stems from the growing criticism the company has been facing for its data collection practices. Regulators in several countries, including India, are looking into the business practices of big tech companies such as Google and Facebook and its implications on users and competition.

An ideal approach is to remove information that can allow personal targeting, by anonymizing and aggregating the information, according to Prasanto K. Roy, a technology and policy consultant.

Google is grouping users under broad topics of interest on their device itself, so personal preferences are not shared even with Google’s own servers, let alone advertisers, with its cookie-replacement tech called ‘Topics’.