Want to Limit Advertisers Tracking You Online? Soon You Can, Says Google
At a recent conference, Google had some news to share which gave advertisers cause for concern. As reported by a Wall Street Journal article, Google announced that they’d soon be releasing a new set of controls which could enable people to manage the ads they see.
The controls would allow users to see all of the cookies stored in the browser and then the chance to block any trackers they didn’t like or want to see.
Information on how the new controls work was scarce, and the pending interface not made available to journalists yet.
Google is hailing it has a new step in Chrome’s ongoing fight to protect user privacy.
The company is also working against other types of tracking techniques, such as non-cookie browser fingerprinting.
As Google engineering VP Prabhakar Raghavan notes in a blog discussing the idea, “Our experience shows that people prefer ads that are personalized to their needs and interest, but only if those ads offer transparency, choice, and control.”
With a continued focus on transparency, Google also released new tools designed to work in tandem with existing ad management programs such as Ad Settings and Mute This Ad.
The new open-source browser extension will let users see who the various intermediaries are who are involved in serving and targeting a specific Google ad. This extension will be available through an open API system to encourage other ad networks to also support this system of increased transparency.
It’s a more granular system than both Safari or Firefox’s privacy measures, which usually block third-party trackers automatically.
Due to Chrome’s popularity alone, this new method of insuring ad transparency just might change the online ad environment, which is already dominated by megacompanies Google and Facebook.
