GDPR Is Helping Google to Retain Advertising & Tracking Dominance

By now, most of the online world knows about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), put in place in May by the European Union. The goal was to protect the privacy of EU citizens online, regardless of whether the service they use originates in Europe or in any region in the world. That means GDPR is a de facto global law.

A major factor in the creation of GDPR was that Google just knows too much. The EU has fined the company $5 billion for violating anti-trust, after all.

But guess who's benefiting quite well from the implementation of GDPR? Yep—Google.

According to research by Cliqz and Ghostery (together, they jointly operate WhoTracks.me to provide information on tracking technologies online), the GDPR has done the most damage to smaller advertisers. Because, don't forget, Google is first and foremost a provider of advertising—that's how it makes most of its moolah. While all advertisers use trackers of some sort to see what we're up to, all the better to target advertising and generate more money, only Google has seen an increase in reach. (At least on the 2,000 top domains visited by European residents, which were analysed for this report.)

Even Facebook saw a 6.66 percent decrease. The top 50 advertisers overall (excluding Google and Facebook) saw a full 20 percent decrease. But Google went up just shy of 1 percent. The measurements were taken by WhoTracks.me, comparing trackers on the market in April 2018 to those available in July 2018.

Why did this happen? The report speculates that Google may have pressured sites to reduce the number of other trackers—but maybe sites just played it safe and got rid of any trackers that were might not have been compliant. Or, maybe, just maybe, Google was so ready to comply that it was in a perfect position to see a gain.

But as the report states unequivocally, "One thing is certain: Google benefits indirectly from the effects of the GDPR."

Change in Trackers per page in EU vs. US since GDPR

The report also shows that the effect of the GDPR on the number of trackers overall in the EU: They're down 3.4 percent from April to July. Over here in the United States of Advertising, though, trackers jumped up 8.29 percent in the same time. For more, read the full report at Cliqz.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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