Usually, when someone visits any website or mobile application, they’ll see a pop-up cookie banner emerge. This banner asks visitors if the owner of the website or app they visit, can collect some data from the visitor’s browser/app, store that data and then possibly use that data for some purposes.
There are two main purposes, analytics and advertising. And four parameters are responsible for collecting consent from visitors to serve these purposes.
The first parameter is analytics_storage, it accepts two possible values: “granted” or “denied”. It tells whether a website visitor gives permission to the website owner to set the cookies related to analytics or not. The information that is usually collected is the device category, country, city, operating system, screen resolution, browser language, date of the visit, the source from which the visit was made, the page through which the user visited the website, etc. In mobile applications, this parameter answers the question whether the user consents to the collection of the App Instance ID for analytics purposes.
The second parameter, ad_storage, collects the user’s permission to use the cookies related to advertising. In the mobile apps, this parameter controls whether Device IDs can be collected and read. It is worth noting that even if a user denies using these cookies for advertising purposes, it doesn’t mean that they won’t see the ads anymore. They’ll have the same amount of ads as before, but those ads will be irrelevant to their interests.
To make ads more relevant and improve the user experience, Google added two new parameters, ad_user_data and ad_personalisation.
The ad_user_data parameter is responsible for whether user data, such as information collected from submitted website forms, can be sent to Google for use in advertising purposes. Note that the laws, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and others, prohibit collecting the information in a form that makes it possible to easily identify the user. Therefore, even if the user consents to use its data, that data will be hashed before being sent to any analytics platform on the market.
The ad_personalization parameter controls whether user data can be used for personalized advertising (e.g., remarketing). For example, an e-commerce website owner can collect the device categories of the visitors that made the most purchases, put those users in one audience segment, and show the ads only to that segment of users.
There is nothing bad in granting access to website owners, and there is nothing bad in denying. The user decides whether they want to improve their experience and see relevant ads or not. The nuance is that it’s just related to third-party tools that help website owners advertise and analyze the data. It’s not related to the situation when the user submitted the form or placed the order. The owner will be able to see user information anyway. But it’s another topic.
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