The push to improve privacy online may be heading in entirely the wrong direction. The Do Not Track (DNT) initiative, supported by most modern browsers, sends a message to a Web site that tracking techniques, largely cookies, should not be used. Although the ad industry complained noisily about DNT, and some just ignored it (it's optional for sites to honour the request), it was tentatively seen as a step in the right direction.
But will it even be relevant? All of the major players are working on alternative tracking technologies, which aim to deepen their ability to track users, ostensibly for the purpose of improving advertising revenue, though inevitably raising privacy concerns at the same time. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all actively working on such cookie alternatives, with the goal of tracking users across devices and ecosystems. Apple already has such capability, and has started enforcing its use among app developers.
The reason for this is that cookies are steadily becoming marginalised. Advertisers use cookies to track your visits across multiple Web sites, building up a background profile of your preferences to better select relevant advertising. That profile is valuable data, but unfortunately, it has a giant blind spot: mobile. Ads in mobile apps don't contribute to the pool of intelligence, and not all mobile browsers do either. Couple that with the inexorable rise of ad-blocking tools, which hinder tracking, and the advertisers are falling rapidly out of love with cookies.
The ecosystem players are the obvious ones to address the problem. Google has tremendous footprints in mobile (Android), Web (search and Chrome) and e-mail, and has made no bones of the fact that its revenue comes from advertising and its market intelligence is what makes the advertising work. Including mobile habits would be a major improvement.
Microsoft, while smaller in the mobile space and search, is growing in both arenas and also has a key consumer audience in Xbox Live, where again usage is not currently correlated with Web ad tracking. The company stands to increase its relevance to advertisers greatly by improving that state of affairs.
Apple's play is entirely in its mobile ecosystem, and its ability to track unique device IDs was a vital value proposition to app advertisers.
Facebook, as the dominant social network, is nearly ubiquitous, and has found itself in hot water before over predatory tracking practices - those "Like" buttons on articles you read are reporting your browsing habits. As Facebook's usage shifts to mobile, it needs to keep its profiling capabilities up to speed.
Right now, everyone is making uncomfortable compromises.
More will come - there is a profusion of third party ad- and social-tracking firms. Tools like Ghostery and Lightbeam can be used to reveal (and block) the many entities watching your every move online, and the results are fascinating - and disturbing.
The fact is that most of the modern Web is paid for by advertising. Although content producers are gradually adopting paywalls, most of what you see, and many mobile apps, exist because of advertising revenue. Attempts to maximise ad revenue saw a generation of ever-more invasive ads, with pop-overs, pop-unders, fly-ins, interstitials and more, widely despised by users and found to be largely ineffective when advertisers started tracking clicks instead of views.
And so the focus shifted to better targeted ads, the theory being that if you show a viewer an ad for a product you know he's interested in, the chances of engagement are orders of magnitude higher. How do you know what he's interested in? You track what sites he visits.
The theory works, but in practice it's struggling.
It's struggling, because the Internet companies did an astoundingly bad job tackling privacy concerns early on, and ad-blockers entered the scene. On average, about a quarter of Web users block ads today, with a strong skew towards technically savvy users. Advertising may get better, but it just isn't reaching its audience. On mobile platforms, most browsers don't support the ad-blocking extensions, but some (notably Firefox) do, and there are alternative solutions as well.
In-app ads, for the time being, usually escape unblocked - and these are the very ads which aren't being tracked. In other words, the only ads some users are seeing are the very ones which started the problem in the first place.
Right now, everyone is making uncomfortable compromises. The ad platforms have to take the responsibility for putting users off online advertising in the first place. Content producers have to put up with losing a slice of revenue to ad-blockers. Users still have to endure advertising and are still fighting for privacy.
The new tracking technologies have an opportunity to ease the sting of those compromises, through transparency. Disclose to the user where and how they are being tracked, and what conclusions are being drawn, and how the data is being used and shared. That may, just may, be a way to unravel the Gordian knot of strong conflicting emotions in online advertising.
Or they may just tighten their grip on our data even more, to the probable delight of Wladimir Palant - the maintainer of the most popular ad-blocker, Adblock Plus.
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