At the beginning of this year I wrote that one of the major trends for the next decade will be a greater drive towards data privacy online. In the last last decade we saw the rise of Facebook and Google (amongst others), amassing petabytes of data about our every online move.
In turn, they have used that data to generate billions in revenue by targeting ads deemed relevant to us. We've seen both the benefits of this kind of personalization when shopping online, and the dark side that this kind of targeting has created.
Google today announced that it would stop tracking users as they browse the web. In effect, Google will be removing third-party cookies from the Chrome web browser by 2022. It also said that it would not create or use any other tools that identify individual users for advertising purposes.
Google will still allow its advertising customers to target users across YouTube and Gmail. You can read more about it in the announcement here.
Well this is a welcomed move, I can't help but feel that this is nothing more than an attempt to challenge Facebook's ad dominance and is this a little too late? Apple made a similar announcement in their iOS 14 update and while not targeting Facebook directly, they included this screenshot displaying the new privacy control features in iOS.
As the battle for privacy online takes shape, new startups have emerged that are privacy first. I for one have replaced most of my typical tech-stack to a privacy-stack.
For browsing, I use Brave.
For search, I use DuckDuckGo.
For email, I use ProtonMail.
For Video, D.tube.
For payments, Monero.
While some of these are not yet as good as their counterparts, they are improving. Most important though, is knowing that my privacy online is preserved.
For me, that is well worth the trade off.
I'm excited to see how online privacy will take shape in the next decade. Big tech (like Google and Apple) are going to have to come to the party. More exciting though is seeing how new startups and decentralized protocols that are truly privacy first begin to grow in popularity and emerge.
If you're building a startup in this space, please talk to me.
The Move Towards Privacy