Google Chrome IP Masking & Search Ads

A week ago, Anu Adegbola wrote a fabulous piece on some new privacy changes that may be coming to Google Chrome in the future named Chrome IP masking and how that may impact advertisers. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, responded to those concerns, saying, “Chrome has not made any recent updates to its IP protection proposal.”

Anu detailed out the three top-level concerns advertisers may have with Google Chrome IP masking:

(1) For ad location targeting, you’ll only have the option to target regions designated by Google, which won’t be accurate.

(2) Because Google Chrome will use a proxy to connect to websites, it will mask users’ identities, meaning advertisers cannot distinguish between genuine and bot traffic.

(3) Google is increasing its collection of uniquely valuable location data, which could increase advertisers’ costs.

If you are technical, you can dig through the Chrome IP Protection on Github and also check out the Google slides IP Protection Updates. Otherwise, An dumbs it down in her article for us all.

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, replied to concerns about this on X saying, “To clarify, Chrome has not made any recent updates to its IP protection proposal. You can find more information on Geolocation here.” Ginny added:

Further, advertisers continue to have control over which general areas they target, including countries, cities, or privacy-safe radius targeting around their businesses. In Google Ads, IP address can help indicate which customers seem to be using a device that connects to the internet in your targeted region, but it’s not the only signal used. As always, geo-targeted campaigns must adhere to strict thresholds where minimum area and minimum user counts are met to protect people’s privacy.

Here are those posts:

Hi Julie, To clarify, Chrome has not made any recent updates to its IP protection proposal. You can find more information on Geolocation here: https://t.co/RzoQN4L2mO.

Further, advertisers continue to have control over which general areas they target, including countries,…

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) April 23, 2024

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.