Google Chrome’s privacy sandbox and its related FLoC tracking plan were previously opposed by many parties, which caused the company to postpone the implementation of its ad tracking personalized technology.
Now, Microsoft has decided to develop its own plan to improve user privacy while maintaining a healthy advertising revenue ecosystem for websites and applications. Microsoft’s plan is called Transparent Ads and can be used in the latest Canary version of the Edge browser.
As you can see from the figure above, through transparent advertising, the Edge browser will be able to show people the personal data collected by the website, who can access the personal data, and which advertisements are personalized as a result.
In other words, users can know where a particular advertisement got their information. Specifically, users will be able to:
- Check which advertising provider is part of the transparent advertising provider program.
- Check which advertising provider is responsible for advertising.
- View information about the data collected or inferred by the advertising provider to personalize the advertisement.
- See which websites use advertising providers to track user information.
- Visit the page of the advertising provider to delete or de-identify all previously collected data. After disabling transparent advertising in the Edge browser settings, the planned advertising provider will no longer collect personal data for personalized advertising.
For advertising providers and websites, this method is a compromise compared to Google’s FLoC, and user data will not be completely captured, but it is currently unknown how many aspects will be supported.
