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LEGISLATION

Although these guidelines may be an attempt by search This makes the situation that Google is currently in
engines to provide transparency, many people never even more difficult after the company announced that it
read them and are therefore unaware of how much of would postpone the blocking of third-party cookies in
their private information, such as passwords and saved Chrome until 2024.
files, can be collected by cookies and logged and
stored by the search engine. Also, these policies are Both Safari and Firefox already block third-party cook-
often very difficult to understand, even in the unlikely ies, and both protect against device fingerprinting,
event that a user decides to read them. which uses other types of data such as browser, screen
resolution, IP address and browser extensions to track
Privacy conscious search engines like DuckDuckGo them.
state in their privacy policies that they collect much less
data than, e.g., Google, which receives billions upon Google, on the other hand, has been promising to do
billions of searches every month and all search terms the same for more than two years. But just last week,
along with the date and time of the search, browser and the search giant announced that it was expanding test-
operating system, IP address of the user, the Google ing for its web privacy sandbox. The reason is probably
cookie and the URL that displays the search are logged that Google cannot simply block cookies without having
in a database. a solution for how to replace them, since tracking is the
lifeblood of the digital advertising industry after all.
Nevertheless, Google with its widely used Chrome
browser is clearly the world's most popular search en- So far, Google hasn't come up with a replacement that
gine. balances privacy and advertising: First there was Fed-
erated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), but it was rejected
The company constantly emphasizes that it works hard by both digital advertisers and privacy advocates, fol-
to protect its users' privacy, while at the same time it lowed by Topics, which at least doesn't allow advertis-
has built its business on the idea of tracking what users ers to use it to learn about the individual users they are
are doing online to show them personalized advertise- targeting; and with the recent delay, Google has made
ments based on their interests and activities. it clear that it still has its hands full. ◊

But Google's privacy policy also says that user data is By Daniela La Marca
shared with various affiliates, subsidiaries, and
"trusted" business partners, without specifying details.

July 2022: Search Marketing 35