Google will stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites in 2022, David Temkin, the company's director of product management, ads privacy and trust announced in a March 3 blog post.
The tech giant made the decision to stop using or investing in technologies that track users as they visit multiple websites to address the public's ongoing concern over the privacy of data on their online behavior.
"If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web," Mr. Temkin wrote.
Google announced in 2020 that it would remove third-party cookies, the most widely used multisite tracking technology, in 2022. The March 3 announcement confirms the company won't build or invest in other multisite tracking technologies to replace the cookies as ad-buying tools, but will instead deploy ad-buying tools designed to generate targeted ads without collecting multisite tracking data.
Mr. Temkin said the announcement doesn’t apply to the ad tools Google uses for mobile apps, only for websites.