Following EU scrutiny, Google to stop sharing info with buyers in ad auctions about the type of content on a page where an ad could appear, starting in February
This is the third time Google has retreated on an ad-data practice under European pressure. In 2017 it stopped using Gmail content for ad targeting and later published a compliance plan to answer the EU's shopping ruling, then in late 2018 agreed to verify all political advertisers in the EU ahead of January elections via the advertiser-verification requirement. The February cutoff on sharing page content-type details with auction buyers extends that arc into the programmatic core of the business.
First-order effects
Ad buyers bidding in Google's auctions lose access to what kind of page their ads appear on from February onward, removing the contextual signal they used to decide placement relevance.
Second-order effects
Buyers are pushed toward the same substitution Google made when it stopped scanning Gmail — leaning on user-level data instead of page-level signals — which concentrates value in whoever owns audience profiles rather than publisher context.
Third-order effects
If each EU intervention peels away one more content-based input, ad targeting structurally migrates from reading the page to profiling the person, leaving publishers' contextual inventory worth less across the market.
The trend: EU antitrust and privacy scrutiny is progressively stripping content-derived signals out of Google's ad stack, pushing programmatic targeting toward user data.
As I told The Financial Times @FT, Google removing categories from RTB bid requests does not stop the biggest data breach in history. Google RTB will still broadcast what you are reading, watching, or listening to, and where you are, to countless companies https://www.ft.com/... …
Google have taken steps to amend RTB protocols to “no longer include contextual content categories in the bid requests.” Welcome change but the broadcast remains that means revealing personal data is spread. More work needed to address DP concerns. https://www.blog.google/...
Google to limit sending private data to advertisers in Real-Time Bidding: “in February 2020 we will no longer include contextual content categories in the bid requests”. I cite below our (first! 2014) privacy analysis. Great impact! ;) #GDPR #ePrivacy https://www.blog.google/... …
This business of incumbents with claims on first-party status retreating into walled gardens and closing their ecosystems, all in the name of ‘privacy’, is really something. https://www.ft.com/...
News: I find this announcement bizarre (1) Google unilaterally making decision impacting entire ecosystem, it's a zero sum game with long history of these decisions only being made if they don't hurt Google's business (ie this likely helps Google). /1 https://www.ft.com/...