The Google group Alphabet is making a U-turn in the field of online advertising.

Contrary to previous announcements, Google plans to continue showing ads for which users are tracked.

According to this, the Google browser should in future identify “a handful of topics” in which the user is currently particularly interested.

The Internet pages that someone called up served as the basis for this.

These interests are used so that the advertising industry can show users advertisements that they are particularly interested in.

Gustave parts

Business correspondent in Stuttgart.

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Changes are necessary because Google wants to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser.

Google announced the step for the first time in early 2020 and named a two-year period.

Apple with Safari and Mozilla with Firefox have been blocking them for a long time, but Chrome's market share is significantly larger.

After fierce protests from the industry and investigations by antitrust authorities, Google had to extend the deadline.

Three themes

With the announcement of the new proposal, the Internet giant buries a first concept: Advertisers should only be able to address cohorts of users with similar interests.

This will not be further developed.

Google describes the new proposal as follows: When users call up a page, three topics from the past three weeks are selected and sent to the website.

These can be used to display advertising tailored to the user.

The interests should be saved for three weeks and old topics should be deleted.

All of this happens on the user's device without the involvement of external servers, not even those of Google.

Users can view and remove saved interests.

The list of possible interests is curated by Google.

Categories such as skin color, religion or gender should not be included.

Basis for online advertising

Almost a year ago, Google announced: "We will not build any alternative identifiers to track individuals when they browse the Internet." The group is now apparently saying goodbye to that.

In addition to the Google proposals, there are other initiatives from companies in the industry that have developed other technical standards for the post-cookie-off period.

So far, cookies have been the basis for much of online advertising.

They always cause resentment because uninterested users often have to click away.

We talk about third-party cookies because they are operated by service providers.

These are small files that are placed on users' computers in order to recognize them.

This information is useful for online advertising because it allows the ads to be better targeted to the user.

If a furniture company knows that a user wants to buy a sofa, the probability of success of a sofa ad increases.

This means that the manufacturer is willing to spend more money on the advertisement and the operator of the website earns more.

This can be many times the revenue that could have been generated without the additional information.

In order to determine which ad is played, auction platforms run real-time auctions for the ad space.

Some want a ban

There is a lot of criticism of the system: in addition to the constant questioning of users whether cookies are allowed, data protection officials are bothered by the fact that a lot of data about users is collected in this way.

That's why individual people can be identified again, they argue.

Industry representatives counter that these are only pseudonyms.

The EU is currently working on new guidelines on how and whether advertising can be personalised.

Some are calling for a total ban.

Google always says it's about improving data protection.

Many media houses and other digital companies criticize that Google is using the move to further expand its market power.

After all, data processing would then no longer be based on an open standard, i.e. cookies, but would take place on the user's device.

Google would ultimately have control over which interests would be displayed.

The group is setting itself up as a substitute legislator, abusing its market power "under the guise of data protection" and distorting competition, some German advertising and media industry associations complained to the EU Commission on Monday.

They wrote that Google's actions would "illegally deny access to legitimate data uses."

The conflict involves a lot of money: Internet site operators, including many publishers, could lose up to 70 percent of their sales as a result of the cookie blockade, the associations wrote, citing an investigation by the British competition authority.

The New York analysis house Magna estimates that almost 400 billion euros were spent on digital advertising around the world last year.

According to an estimate by the Boston Consulting Group, every second euro spent on digital advertising could be affected by the cookie-off.