Google is tracking your digital fingerprints again
Google is tracking your online behavior in the name of advertising, reintroducing a data collection process that ingests all of your online signals (from IP address to complex browser information) and pinpoints unique users or devices, also known as "digital fingerprinting."
The company's updated platform program policies include relaxed restrictions on advertisers and personalized ad targeting across a range of devices, an outcome of a larger "advertising ecosystem shift" and the advancement of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like on-device processing and trusted execution environments, in the words of the company.
A departure from its longstanding pledge to user choice and privacy, Google argues these technologies offer enough protection for users while also creating “new ways for brands to manage and activate their data safely and securely." The new feature will be available to advertisers beginning Feb. 16, 2025.
"With new innovations like PETs to mitigate risks, we see an opportunity to set a high privacy bar on the use of data like IP. We can do this by applying privacy-preserving protections that help businesses reach their customers across these new platforms without the need to re-identify them," writes Google. "And because we’re looking to encourage responsible data use as the new standard across the web, we’ll also partner with the broader ads industry and help make PETs more accessible."
