‘It’s Almost as if One Company Shouldn’t Simultaneously Be the Market Leader in Three Separate Industries: Search, Advertising, and Web Browsing’

Jeremy Keith, writing last April about FLoC:

Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Google’s Chrome browser will also disable third-party cookies at some time in the future (they’re waiting to shut that barn door until the fire is good’n’raging). But Google isn’t just in the browser business. Google is also in the ad tech business. So they still want advertisers to be able to target end users.

Yes, this is quite the cognitive dissonance: one part of the business is building a user agent while a different part of the company is working on ways of tracking end users. It’s almost as if one company shouldn’t simultaneously be the market leader in three separate industries: search, advertising, and web browsing. (Seriously though, I honestly think Google’s search engine would get better if it were split off from the parent company, and I think that Google’s web browser would also get better if it were a separate enterprise.)

Anyway, one possible way of tracking users without technically tracking individual users is to assign them to buckets, or cohorts of interest based on their browsing habits. Does that make you feel safer? Me neither.

This was written about FLoC, but applies perfectly to Topics as well.

★ Wednesday, 2 February 2022