The relationship between Apple and Google is complicated, with Apple targeting Chrome through advertising campaigns.
Google is trying to convince Safari users to start using Chrome, in the face of potential monopoly restrictions in the US and Europe.
This move aims to increase Chrome’s install base from 30% to 50% among iPhone users, adding 300 million new users. Apple, using Chrome’s Achilles heel, privacy, is promoting Safari with ads that highlight how Chrome doesn’t adequately protect privacy. Apple’s new ad supports Safari as the best choice for privacy.
Read more: Apple: Hires dozens of Google AI experts
When “The Birds” was released in the 1960s, it was scary and provocative, with its message focused on an invisible threat. Similarly, Apple’s video seems to target Android users, but the point is to retain iPhone. Despite users’ preference for Google Search, Apple is looking to improve Safari, launching the “Private Browsing 2.0” update for better privacy. The move is part of the intensifying competition between Chrome and Safari. For its part, Google is promoting the Topics API to replace tracking cookies.
The Topics API was designed to provide an alternative that balances the disruption of collecting individual fingerprints from various websites and targeted marketing. Users will be grouped into anonymous, but like-minded cohorts, which will be presented to advertisers.
As Apple points out, “imagine what advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence can reveal, using various combinations of signals of interest. What patterns will emerge when data brokers and analysts can compare information from large portions of the population? Remember, API Topics data can be combined with any other available data. The combined analysis of this data feeds the algorithms that try to draw conclusions about you.
See also: Google Chrome: The fastest browser in the world
What Apple is saying, in simple terms, is that fingerprinting and cross-site tracking will continue. No half-measures within Chrome can compare to the pure and complete approach to privacy that it itself promotes.
Google is caught between the existing tracking cookies we all love to hate and a new set of technologies that have so far failed to deliver. Apple aims to undermine Google's Privacy Sandbox before it even fully launches
Read also: Google Chrome Blink: The changes that will annoy Apple
The browser battle is just beginning, and Apple has deployed powerful weapons to compete with Chrome before any changes.
Source: forbes
