Facebook is changing the way its targeted advertisements work, the company announced in a blog post last week, acknowledging the desire for privacy more than a year after Apple flipped the digital advertising industry on its head.
Now one year and several aggressive anti-Apple ads later, Facebook is pivoting away from the advertising tactics that made its platform such a useful tool for small businesses to reach their desired audiences (but also one that captured an uncomfortable amount of information on said audiences).
“With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data,” Facebook VP of Product Marketing and Ads Graham Mudd wrote in a blog post.
The social media giant hopes to become less reliant on third-party data while still remaining an effective platform for small businesses to provide personalized and targeted advertising. It aims to deliver targeted advertisements to individual users without necessarily knowing anything about those individual users. Facebook listed its Private Lift Measurement solution as its primary mechanism, “which uses a privacy-enhancing technology called secure multi-party computation.” The tech is designed to prevent advertisers (and Facebook) from having limitless learning abilities on the user.
Facebook took an aggressive anti-Apple approach in 2020, criticizing the company’s prioritization of privacy due to its ultimate impact on small businesses. The latter is difficult to deny: Small businesses thrive off of Facebook’s model, and getting rid of it would drastically hinder companies from growing or even getting off the ground. Whether or not that’s a good enough reason to allow third-party companies from harvesting user data with impunity is an entirely different argument, but a handful of companies are hoping to establish a new set of rules that don’t quite abolish useful ads in favor of user privacy.
“New products and services would be harder to discover and would cost more, and people would see less relevant, less timely and less interesting ads,” Mudd wrote.
It’s not clear how much of an impact these changes will have on the average user, many of whom either have (iOS) or soon will have (Android OS) the chance to opt out of tracking altogether. It’s possible that the changes are designed to bring Facebook back into the good graces of more privacy-focused users (assuming there’s an overlap between privacy advocates and Facebook users).
Head over to The Verge for a lengthy Q&A with Graham Mudd.
Apple in 2020 announced plans for App Tracking Transparency, a prompt that would allow its users to consent to cross-app tracking. Should users agree, an app on the user’s device would be able to track the user’s habits across other apps on the device. Many users have opted out of the historically standard practice, with reports showing that opt-in rates sit anywhere between 16–35%.
Apple’s decision would technically only impact iOS users, though the move would mount pressure on other organizations to try and follow suit.
Months before Apple’s privacy-focused feature would go live, Google announced plans to introduce a similar policy with Android devices in a late 2021 update. Soon, Android users will have the chance to opt out of a setting akin to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. Should users opt out of tracking, Google says advertisers will receive “a string of zeros instead of the identifier” commonly used to pinpoint an individual user. Android users already have the ability to limit system-wide tracking. They can also manually reset their Advertising ID. But this latest change should make it easier for users to define their preferences with a greater sense of permanence.
Google says the new policy will go into effect later this year as part of the upcoming Android 12 update, with a more widespread implementation expected in early 2022.
Google also recently announced its own plans to move on from the traditional targeting techniques on its Chrome browser. Dubbed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), Google planned on delivering users relevant advertisements “by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.” Google claimed advertisers could see results at least 95% as effective as cookie-based advertising during its initial simulations.
Not everyone is convinced that this is enough to preserve user privacy, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called FLoC “a terrible idea.” EFF claims that fingerprinting — the practice of aggregating otherwise discrete pieces of data to create a unique identifier for a particular user — will become easier to accomplish since Google’s plan already groups its users into cohorts of only a few thousand users.
“Fingerprinting mitigation generally involves trimming away or restricting unnecessary sources of entropy—which is what FLoC is,” the EFF wrote in a March 2021 post. “Google should not create new fingerprinting risks until it’s figured out how to deal with existing ones.”
Google does acknowledge the problem with fingerprinting, and promises to address it in the future.
