"Web Giants Threaten End to Cookie Tracking"
According to a report published on the Wall Street Journal,in the past month Google, Microsoft and Facebook, have said they are developing systems to plug into and control this river of data in ways that bypass the more than a thousand software companies that place cookies on websites.
The moves could radically shift the balance of power in the $120 billion global digital advertising industry,and have ad technology companies scrambling to figure out their next play.
"There is a Battle Royal brewing," says Scott Meyer, chief executive of Evidon Inc., a company that helps businesses keep track of the cookies on their websites. "Whoever controls access to all that data can charge rent for it and has a tremendous advantage going forward." The Silicon Valley trio, which produce browsers, email services and operating systems used by billions across many devices, are positioned to potentially learn far more about people's activities than cookies ever could. Today, a diverse ecosystem of companies places cookies on websites to track people through browsers; now the giants see an opportunity to get into tracking themselves.
The swift adoption of mobile gadgets is driving the changing landscape. Cookies let advertisers reach digital audiences, but the trail stops at smartphones and tablets, because cookie technology doesn't work well on them. Advertisers are hungry for consumer behavior on mobile devices, such as which workers are more likely to browse eBay during their lunch breaks, or the precise moment during a game of Angry Birds when a person would be most susceptible to an ad.
On Wednesday Microsoft announced that the company will give marketers the ability to track and advertise to people who use apps on its Windows 8 and 8.1 operating system on tablets and PCs. The company will do this by assigning each user a number—a unique identifier—that monitors them across all of their apps.
Earlier this year,Apple Inc. also began offering advertisers the ability to trail and target users through a unique ID on smartphones and tablets.
Google's plans, which the company disclosed in only the broadest of terms last month, would also make use of a unique ID. In a statement about its efforts, the company said "technological enhancements" like an identifier could improve security "while ensuring the Web remains economically viable."
Facebook's new ad service, launched earlier this month, gets around the traditional third-party advertising cookies by doing the tracking on its own. When a person visits a website selling shoes on a work PC, a piece of Facebook code placed on that site(Facebook's own cookie) recognizes that the person has logged into Facebook using that browser before.
