In April of last year, Apple
"People can't really be targeted the way they were before," says Eric Seufert, a media strategist author of the mobile advertising blog Mobil Dev Memo. "That breaks the model. It's not just an inconvenience that can be fixed with a couple of tweaks. It requires rebuilding the foundation of the business."
Google didn't give many details beyond its plan to reduce app tracking and data collection, as well as phrasing out the Advertising ID feature on Android devices that allows advertisers to monitor user behavior, interests, and activities. Google said opting out of this program is already a choice users can make.
Along with the pledge to limit the sharing of data by Android phones, Google said that its new rules will not be as disruptive as those introduced by Apple in 2021. It's worth noting that, while Google makes the majority of its money through selling digital advertising, Apple makes most of its money by selling its devices.
Marketing experts say that Google's move is a "weak gesture" compared to Apple's privacy feature and that the company will continue to face pressure to do more to catch up.
"This is a reaction to what Apple has done," Wayne Coburn, a product director at marketing software company Iterable, told The New York Times. "Google wouldn't be doing this on their own."
In an interview prior to the official announcement, a vice president for Google's Android division, Anthony Chavez, said that there was no way to know at this point how Google's changes will impact the market. He also added that Apple's blunt way of doing things wasn't working, citing a study showing that third-party tracking hadn't been significantly impacted by the additional safety feature.
According to a recent earnings report from Meta, Apple's app-tracking permissions feature is expected to cost the social media company $10 billion in 2022. Following the release of the earnings report on Feb. 3, stock prices for companies that rely on digital ads saw sharp declines. Twitter's
Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest recovered their losses within a week, though Pinterest and Twitter have since dipped below their Feb. 3 rates.
Due to their domination of the smartphone market, the decisions made by Google and Apple have the potential to change how mobile apps virtually work across the board. As requests from lawmakers, regulators, and the public for more privacy protections gain traction with these two cell giants, data collecting companies are feeling the squeeze.
The data-collection model of digital advertising has been a central component of of the internet for two decades. Now that the model is being threatened, it's unclear what will take its place.
"The internet is answering a question that it's been wrestling with for decades, which is: How is the internet going to pay for itself?" said Jeff Green, chief executive of ad-tech company Trade Desk.
Still, it's unlikely that Meta and other tech giants like it will be negatively affected for long by this change. Instead, it's more probable that they will be the ones left with the most data on users, making them the best choice left to turn to for advertisers. Chavez said in his interview that Google apps would not be given preferential access to user data on Android.
