The beauty of digital marketing lies in its ability to be highly targeted. If you run ads on social media or through Google’s vast ad platform, you know how amazing it is to target based on criteria like gender, education level, income, and location.

These targeted ads perform better than untargeted ones, allowing you to reach customers at lower acquisition costs. However, this requires platforms to gather as much information about you as possible and track your activity across the internet and apps to send you these highly targeted ads.

Several years ago, Apple introduced features to its platforms that prevented this type of tracking through its apps and browser as part of its privacy stance. This move was quickly followed by other browsers like Firefox. Google also promised to do the same but has repeatedly delayed implementing this change (Google halts its 4-plus-year plan to turn off tracking cookies by default in Chrome).

So why did Google get cold feet? In 2022, Meta (then Facebook) saw a $250 billion drop in valuation due to Apple’s new rules (How Apple helped create Facebook’s $250 billion ad crisis). Despite Google’s size, a significant portion of its revenue comes from ads. Blocking third-party cookies in the world’s most-used web browser would have a seismic impact on its business. Google’s hope was to block third-party cookies in Chrome while replacing them with a worse tracking method called FloC (Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea), but as that path became unattainable, it decided to backtrack on its previous plan.

This leaves us with a new ad campaign launched by Apple, reminding folks not to use Chrome unless they want their browser to track, watch, and report everything they do. 

So, what browser are you using?