I know it impacts advertisers ability to target, but would love a clearer explanation of how it works and the impact.
In: Technology
The explanation by u/ledow is mostly correct. There are two things I’d like to add:
– Privacy through aggregation
– Consequences of eliminating cookies
Google, Facebook, etc. are not in the business of selling your data. They’re in the business of selling ads. That might sound weird at first, but consider the fact that their defensible moat of technology and IP is contingent upon having *that* data. Why would you sell your resources instead of leveraging them towards selling your product? They offer targeted advertising, which might give information about those targeted through completed purchases and account creation, but that’s only once a user has made a decision to buy the product advertised.
Eliminating cookies has led to a weird spot. Google’s Chrome is so incredibly popular that they can make changes without much repercussion, and the ones they’re going forward with are “pseudo-privacy” enhancements. They’re more so adjustments to make Google seem like good guys along with Apple, rather than exposing more of you to the internet than before.
Before, you’d get unique identifiers attached to you at a website level, which Google would collect to track you across sites. Because it would take lots of collaboration across many, many sites to discern these identifiers, most people would default to just using Google’s in-house ad offering. This was good for your privacy in that, as mentioned above, Google sells ads *from* data rather than the data itself.
The change coming is that instead of you having a *unique* identifier, you’re getting a *cohort* identifier. Chrome will have machine learning models built in which map your behaviors to pre-determined cohorts (the models are exported from supercomputer computations of data they already had on everyone, so there is no ML computation going on in chrome; it’s just matching your history to cohorts). For example, if you buy pet food and leather belts, you might be put in the pink35 group. To be clear, these cohorts are **tremendously** complex, are based off of thousands of features, and they’re too abstract for any human to discern.
This might seem good for privacy since if you go around with pink35 on you, you’re going around with a tag shared by thousands of people. How could that not help privacy? The reason it doesn’t is that by having cohorts, it becomes quite reasonable to collaborate across sites to discern what these cohorts signify to some extent. You’ve reduced the quantity of identifiers significantly, especially when businesses inside an industry likely share cohort customers. It becomes even worse when there are now thousands of other people who act like you helping to fill in the gaps of what you likely do.
Suppose I’m marked with pink35. Everyone else in pink35 is willing to buy without coupon codes or sales, so sellers adjust their sites to hide them from pink35 or to even increase prices. This is price discrimination and often occurs using geography or device screen size. However, with these cohorts, you can do it easier and more robustly.
Google is saying “look how helpful I am” while causing a large mess.
This analysis of cohorts came from Ben Thompson of Stratechery.
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