Internet giant Google announces additional measures to protect Android phone users from advertisers who follow them unseen. That made the company Wednesday known†
This change, to be completed in the next two years, is a sensitive one. Google itself has a dominant position in the online advertising market, making it more difficult for competitors to offer customized advertisements. As a developer of the Android operating system, Google itself has more options to track users and serve them targeted advertising.
Apps that you install on an Android phone can now easily follow the behavior of the user, without them noticing. A new feature, the ‘Privacy Sandbox’, aims to prevent this.
Advertising companies prey on phone user data because it contains a lot of personal information – including the user’s location. Android is the most popular operating system on phones, with a global market share of about 70 percent. Apple’s iOS, the operating system of the iPhone, accounts for more than 25 percent of the market.
Brake on the data flow
Apple introduced new privacy conditions last year that offer the choice in advance whether you want to be followed by apps. Most iPhone users choose the ‘no’ option. This affects Facebook’s revenue model, which means that it is less aware of which advertisements users see. Apple’s changes will cost Facebook at least $10 billion in revenue, the company announced earlier this year. The impact of a brake on the data flow from Android could be greater.
Google says it wants to implement the privacy changes in a less ‘bland’ way, in consultation with competition authorities. “We want to make sure we don’t favor our own advertising products,” wrote Anthony Chavez, responsible for privacy settings in Google Android.
The company is under fire over complaints of abuse of power in the advertising company. Google occupies all strategic positions in the advertising chain: it manages the most popular search engine, the automatic ad auctions, the most popular web browser, the most used mobile operating system and the largest video site (YouTube).
No more cookies
The changes in Android accelerate fundamental changes in the digital advertising market. Stricter privacy rules will soon make targeted advertising almost impossible.
European regulators want to prevent the use of so-called third party cookies for targeted advertising.
Google, which develops the Chrome web browser (70 percent market share), already announced the end of that cookie years ago. FLOC, the technology that Google developed for this, ended in a flop. The intention was to no longer follow consumers individually, but on the basis of larger groups with the same interests.
Last quarter, Google made $61 billion from advertising, primarily based on searches.
On the iPhone, Google is hardly affected by the restrictions that Apple introduced, because Google Search is the default search engine in Apple’s browser. For that preferential position, Google pays billions a year to Apple.
Google is getting more competition in the field of search ads, especially from Amazon, which developed an advertising network for its web store. There, sellers can also promote their articles. Last year, Amazon made $31 billion from advertising sales.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is the other digital advertising superpower with $33 billion in quarterly revenue. Meta invests a lot in 3D technology. With its own ‘metaverse’, an online 3D world, Meta hopes to make itself less dependent on the drying data flow from the mobile devices of Apple and Google.