The Digital Fingerprinting Goes Open

What is Digital Fingerprinting?

The need for user information is growing driven by the AI adoption. AI needs data for both training and to operate efficiently in the right user context.

Recently Google went against its own advise and openly gave “its advertisers the go-ahead to use digital fingerprinting to uniquely identify internet users and track their actions across the web.”

This does not mean that it was not done until now, it is just becoming valid method for Google. In the light of the waning cookie replacement initiative, there are not that many options left.

The cookie replacement initiative had one challenge - it was not fixing the issue, it barely isolated cookies from other trackers, by expecting to use your login instead of them. As result Google can securely follow you everywhere.

In EU there are already signs of awareness and early stage legislative attempts to provide removal of all behavior data for kids at age of 18 for free and paid for adults. It is not clear how it will be implemented and what will be the impact on advertisement industry. Anyway if you use your Google account when browsing that is not relevant to you as you are tracked already.

Original article

source: Forbes, March 9, 2025