| Google has doubled down on its Privacy Sandbox with the announcement this week that it will not participate in the development of alternative identifiers, and will not use them. Alternative identifiers, such as Unified ID 2.0 (developed by The Trade Desk) and LiveRamp’s ATS typically work by attempting to associate online behavior with a piece of first-party data like an email address, making addressable advertising possible — at least for those individuals who have somehow made themselves known. Google said that “People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising.” But the main development emerging from the Privacy Sandbox, known as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) does precisely that. It just doesn’t store the tracking data in a way which associates it with an individual (even an anonymized individual), but aggregates it into a behavioral cohort (a large group of individuals) stored at the browser level. In other words, advertisers will be able to target not an individual who has been researching a certain kind of shoe purchase, say, but a large group of individuals who have been exhibiting that behavior. Many questions remain to be answered about FLoC — in particular, whether Google will have any privileged insight into the users grouped into a cohort. It might also be hard to convince consumers why this particular kind of tracking is no threat to privacy. But for now, Google has made its opposition to competing methods of tracking identities clear. Why we care. With the battle between Facebook and Apple over the IDFA opt-in, and now the spectacle of Google’s outright opposition to alternative identifiers being developed by the adtech industry, disruption rather than collaboration within the adtech space continues to be the order of the day. Read more here. | 