Currently, Google will support devices for up to two years before phasing out the current advert system. The users will benefit to a large extent but Google will not undergo revenue degeneration on lines of Facebook (in context of Ask App not to track feature from Apple). One subtle difference in this context is that Android users will still need to alter the tracking settings manually. This is a vital difference from what Apple introduced in terms of tracking changes.
How Big A Deal is Advertisement Revenue for Google?
In terms of gross advert revenue Google India alone has seen a year on year growth of close to 22 per cent. According to company reports from Google, close to 44 per cent total revenue during the third quarter last year came from digital advertisement. Since Facebook is a heavily ad revenue reliant company, Apple’s privacy changes caused its to lose about 10 billion dollars in revenue from ads in the last quarter of 2021. “..In Apple’s case, users automatically see a standard prompt seeking their consent,” says Isha Suri, a senior researcher, Centre for Internet and Society. Despite this Apple’s changes made it possible for introduction of an interface that was clear. It helped with opting out of the tracking across apps and also offered knowledge of all data these apps gathered, to the user. As of now, there is no clarity of how and how much of user preferences Google will be taking into account. Suri believes that the core of changes must be preserving of privacy, over anything else. Towards the latter half of 2021, Google had announced automatic removal of advertising ID for users opting out of personalized advertisements. Even app makers would receive strings instead of specific identifier.
A Way Forward
Advertising IDs help developers track app usage across applications and then frame targets based on ads in-app. Of late, Google and even Facebook, has been facing concerns for the practices they follow for data collection. The right approach will be removal of info that can form personal targets and instead anonymize the same.
