Google says ‘informed choice’ is the future and we are holding them to it

When I left the agency world last September, I celebrated that I would never again have to write another ‘cookieless future’ point-of-view.  Alas, here we are.

It’s not just tedious, it's absurd. A $700 billion industry hangs on the words of one behemoth. Countless hours and dollars are spent wading through confusing announcements, buried ledes, misdirections, and course reversals. The reality is apparent: The industry’s collective future is tethered to the whims and schemes of a monopolist.

Equally clear: This whole debacle has very little to do with privacy.

For those in the ad world tracking real privacy-related developments, it was always evident that this was a blend of end-running regulators and commercial opportunism. This was about maintaining control and preemptively distorting the concept of privacy to suit big tech interests.

This latest Google announcement is no different: An anti-competitive move under the guise of a marginally more convincing “privacy” cover. Instead of eliminating third-party cookies, Google intends to give users “informed choice that applies across their web browsing.” 

Details are scarce. We have little insight into what this experience will look like or what regulators will say. The result will likely ultimately be the same.

Many have speculated that Google will likely roll out a mandatory or universal opt-out, comparable to Apple’s iOS AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) prompt. This would render third-party cookies effectively obsolete anyway. Everyone wants to know when. This is the wrong question. 

It should be abundantly clear by now that the answer, regulatory intervention notwithstanding, is 'whenever it suits them.' We should be used to these types of games.

But we aren’t entirely in the dark.

We know that when people are given an actual choice, they often opt out. We saw this with Apple’s rollout of iOS14.5 and AppTrackingTransparency. The design of the experience and language used are undoubtedly important here, and antitrust and privacy regulators will scrutinise them.

While some consider Apple’s prompt 'aggressive', the language is fairly neutral and accurately describes what people are opting into. This is misdirected frustration. The problem is not the language—it’s the double standard. Apple initially made its separate 'ad personalisation' choice prompt a more favourable 'opt-out'. That didn’t last. However, the setting still lives on an individual choice screen, which explains that 'The Apple advertising platform doesn’t track you'.

Google will likely be more measured until they assess what they can get away with i.e. whether the same choice screen or language will need to govern their cross-context tracking via Chrome and Android, the data they get from Google Analytics, and how it would impact the combination of data across their other products and properties.

But remember, just like their unilateral terms and policies, the design of the choice experience can change at any time. Between legal challenges and commercial strategy, there’s no reason to think that the first iteration will be the one that sticks.

We know that big tech doesn’t play by the same rules. In big tech privacy parlance, it’s only 'tracking' when third parties do it. It’s 'personalisation' when they use the troves of data they’ve amassed to target ads. And, there is no shortage of carve-outs for where consent (or opt-out) isn’t required—for example, where data is used for nebulous internal operational purposes, to improve their products or services, or some other claim to “legitimate interest.”

When Sundar Pichai says that “user choice” is the 'best path forward', it’s difficult not to laugh. Google has adamantly worked to codify its self-serving definition of privacy—one that: 

• Protects its data empire through first-party data carve-outs
• Positions the cross-context data collected about people’s web and app activity as first-party vs. third-party because it owns Chrome and Android and receives data from the millions of websites using Google Analytics
• And, as a result, creates a false friction between privacy and competition

Meanwhile, Google has consistently failed to provide transparency and offer meaningful choices, undermining privacy and competition.

My latest favourite illustrative drum to beat: It’s been over a year, and we still don’t know what Google’s secret x-goog-visitor-id identifier is or is used for. Another recent covert tracking lawsuit states 'Where users have not been presented with an actual choice, there can be no consent.'

Also, remember when Google tried to redefine contextual to include aggregated information from tracking users’ viewing habits? They stated that 'affinity audience segments' can be 'non-personalised', where they are developed using 'contextual signals derived from other similar videos.'

What about the hidden Chrome extension that hoover up the device and performance data? Or their tracking of people in incognito mode, where people did make an informed choice, and Google simply ignored it. How can users have a choice over what they don’t know exists? How is choice meaningful if Google quietly avails itself of carve-outs and exceptions? Between hidden tracking, endless exceptions, and semantics gymnastics, how could anyone be sure that Google isn’t unfairly advantaging its own business?

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the lack of transparency and choice Google’s ad products provide to its business customers. Google’s penchant for extraction is universal, and their playbook is consistent. See, transparency and choice are necessary conditions for both privacy and competition. 

Google is staring down the barrel of an anti-trust reckoning

The DOJ v. Google adtech anti-trust trial kicks off in September. We’ll cover it on the ground and have launched a website to help others follow along. The divestiture of (at a minimum) its sell-side adtech has been on the wishlist of antitrust authorities in the US and Europe for some time. Google has been honing its narratives and strategies to weather the storm.

It has been downplaying its network business' importance to its shareholders and the broader market through its influence network of shills, proxies, and paid mouthpieces. The opacity of their financial reporting segments makes owning the narrative straightforward and obfuscates that data is central to Google’s power. Google already tried to offer a spin-off of their sell-side adtech within Alphabet’s walls two years ago, so they’ve been planning for this sacrifice for years.

At the same time, Google has been aggressively pushing its AI-driven Performance Max campaigns, which allow it to seamlessly move money across channels as it sees fit, mainly out of view. The roll-out of AI Overviews (and ads therein) creates even more O&O surface area at further expense to publisher traffic.

Their strategy has been to maintain control and remain nimble.

Today, Google may still benefit from monetising garbage open web inventory through extension networks. Tomorrow, they could easily double down on their growing O&O empire, toddler clicks and all, under the cover of their black-box algorithms and limited placement reporting. And again, good luck proving that they’re using data and shouldn’t be using it to advantage their products.

So what does this mean?

Third-party cookies are not here to stay. 

Pop champagne at your peril for those clinging to third-party cookies and insufficient data.

The timing of this move is an attempt to insulate Chrome from being pulled into the fray of their antitrust reckoning, with the added benefit of getting the CMA to cancel the issuance of its latest quarterly report.

As the adtech antitrust trial nears, attention is increasingly turning to what effective antitrust remedies might look like.

Just before the third-party cookies announcement, I spoke to a journalist at Capitol Forum about how, in light of Google’s plans to move the auction to the browser and to continue its cross-site tracking, selling off the GAM suite would be necessary but insufficient. For the remedy to be effective, Chrome and Android must be addressed.

We anticipate that Google will try to point its jazz hands at its revised third-party cookies plan, suggesting that Chrome operates independently from and doesn’t cater to its adtech business and that it’s not 'forcing' Privacy Sandbox adoption.

Nothing to see here.

We can place bets on what the tracking prompt would look like if and when the Google Ad Manager suite is eventually sold off and their interest in their owned properties increases even further.

Meanwhile, what will Google do with data from people signed into Chrome or the telemetry it gets from the Chrome extensions?

Or the data from people signed into a Google or Android account?

Will it claim 'consent' or carve it out under some 'internal purpose' exception and magically connect it to Google Analytics and DV360 data it gathers from millions of sites?

Will we even know?

For the entire industry, this should be a wake-up call 

It’s time to stop clinging to a past that never served us.

To continue to tether the future of one’s business to Google’s whims and their haggling with regulators is simply negligent and a failure to serve shareholders.

Further, to continue to rely on ubiquitous tracking by any means that undermines choice and squanders trust to achieve scale would be equally as costly to marketers and publishers as the junk data and wrong metrics this tracking has enabled.

This is not the time to bury our heads in the sand of yesterday’s false promises. This is the time for marketers to regain control and publishers to reclaim their value so that tomorrow is better for everyone.

Now, all of us can come together to rally around the ongoing and impending antitrust actions and make our voices heard by the policymakers working to level the playing field and restore the market's health. We can’t allow big tech and its proxies to continue to own the narrative and misrepresent our interests as they entrench their vision for our collective future.

It’s time to listen to our audiences, customers, and communities, and to compete on the trusted relationships that monopolists and middlemen have been allowed to pilfer for profit.

It’s time to chart a future where transparency is table-stakes, quality is aligned with value, and no one company has the power to decide what choices we are allowed to make unilaterally.

Arielle Garcia is the director of intelligence at Check My Ads Institute. Stay up to speed on the landmark Google adtech antitrust trial at www.USvGoogleAds.com.