The digital advertising giant’s move should help the industry move away from individual tracking, which is increasingly criticized not only by privacy-conscious users but also by regulators around the world. This decision by Google is also likely to generate a backlash from advertisers, many of whom rely on individual tracking to deliver personalized ads.

“People don’t have to accept that their online activities are being tracked to benefit from relevant ads. Advertisers don’t need to track individual consumer online activity to take advantage of digital advertising. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device data processing, and other privacy technologies are providing a clear path to replacing individual identifiers, ” Google said in a statement.

It is worth noting that last year Google announced its intention to refuse the use of third-party cookies in its branded Chrome browser. Instead, the company is leveraging Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) technology to deliver results that are just as effective as personalized ads based on user IDs. FLoC technology uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior on the Internet. In this case, individual users’ identification is not carried out, but they are divided into groups. This approach helps to obtain data about a wider audience without compromising the privacy of individual users.