What is privacy?
Turns out, there’s no easy answer, even for David Temkin, Google’s senior director of product management for ads privacy and user trust.
“Privacy is not itself quantifiable. It’s a subjective sense; it’s relative to people’s expectations,” Temkin says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “[Privacy is] relative to what they understand as reasonable and fair and what they understand as comprehensible.”
And that makes Temkin’s job nothing if not interesting. There’s a lot on his plate.
Temkin, if you recall, is the author of a March blog post that declared Google will not build alternative identifiers or any new tracking technology even after third-party cookies are finally removed from Chrome.
That post also made it clear that Google does not support email-based identifiers, such as Unified ID 2.0. Although UID2 was not specifically mentioned by name in the blog post, Google’s stance on email-based IDs caused the industry’s hair to catch on fire – for a few weeks at least.
But those feelings are normal, and even Google Ads is used to the status quo, Temkin says.
“We know that the current practices work; we’re comfortable with them and we have years – decades – of experience working with them successfully,” he says. “When you start changing the fundamentals, which is what’s going on in the web standards world right now, everyone starts saying, ‘Whoa, I’m taking a leap into the unknown.’”
