Ghostery's CEO thinks that regulation won't safeguard us from ad trackers

The world of online advertising has changed dramatically since Ghostery was first launched in 2009, with the goal of helping people understand and stop all the ways advertisers track them. Since then, Ghostery and ad blocking have attracted a large user base. (In Ghostery's case, the company says it's been downloaded more than 100 million times, and 7 million people use the app or browser extension each month.) Meanwhile, major browsers are promising more privacy-friendly features, and the EU is trying to regulate the issue through GDPR legislation.

As Ghostery turns 15 this month, TechCrunch sat down with CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz to discuss the company's strategy, the state of ad tracking, and why he thinks regulation isn't the most effective way to protect online privacy. We are here to talk about 15 years of ghottery. Maybe the best place to start your commitment: What is your story with Ghostery? I became deeply involved in 2016, halfway through '15, when we acquired Ghostery.

If you go back to 2008 or 2009, that's when the web really started to change. Because before that, Google was a very private company that only did search and didn't have much industrial tracking to speak of. But Facebook was offering all kinds of social analytics and stuff, and a bunch of engineers, myself included (I was more into search at the time), started noticing that we didn't really like the way our browser was being used for invisibility. send signals to many third parties. Therefore, what you are starting to do is that you are starting to stop [tracking], and the [tracker] essentially indicates it, and at that time many [other products] appeared. Then you notice that your ads are less and then you noticed that you don't like advertising. So you start blocking it. After all, more and more third-party [tracking] has become a growing trend in the industry over the last 15 years, and more and more is happening behind the scenes. When you said you bought Ghostery it was through Cliqz right?

 Back then, Cliqz was a search engine. And we realized that as an independent search engine we needed a browser because Google didn't distribute us, Firefox was in bed with Google, Safari was in bed, pretty much everybody was in bed with Google, so we decided we should make a browser. Because of that history we just mentioned, we wanted a browser that could do things like tracking and blocking. More generally, it sounds like you're seeing a continued increase in the number of trackers?

The numbers have clearly increased significantly. There was a bit of a bump in the road or a bit of a fork in the road in Europe when GDPR came out, where we first saw a drop in GDPR and then a big spike as companies tried to figure out their consent layers and stuff. . such. We are currently seeing a shift to first-party cookies vs. third-party cookies, but things may change again (this week) when Google announces that it won't get third-party cookies after all. It's a bit unclear what's going to happen [next], I actually think Google wants to [block third-party cookies], but publishers, advertisers and competition authorities are standing up and saying, "Wait, if you're going to do this, you're going to hurt my business.

Google announced (this week) that they will make this an option for users. This is very interesting because they don't tell you whether you choose to turn privacy on or off. We will have to find out, but the problem is  and the reason why Ghostery continues to be super relevant — is that you just cannot trust Big Tech [or] regulation to come to your rescue. I want to talk about both of those categories, Big Tech and regulation. You mentioned that there was a bifurcation with GDPR where tracking went down a bit and then went up again. Is it because companies realize they can get people to say yes and consent to tracking? What happened was that in the US it continued to grow, but in Europe it declined significantly. But then companies started finalizing those levels of consent. When they found out, the tracking resumed. Does the US have more songs than Europe? It is imperative to assume.

Therefore, it has an effect, but is it not always changing the track? It had an effect, but not enough. Because these permanent layers are basically designed to trick you into saying yes. As soon as you say yes, they stop asking, and if you say no, they keep asking. But luckily, if you agree and have Ghostery installed, it doesn't matter because we'll block it anyway. And then big tech has a huge advantage because they always get consent, right? If you can't Google something without clicking the blue button, you're giving them access to all your data, and you're going to have to trust people like us to clean it up. So when they talk about the big tech companies and their browsers, they also talk about additional measures against cookies and other forms of tracking. Do you think they have made significant progress? Safari did this for a while and almost destroyed Facebook's business. But as you can see, Facebook came back, didn't it? So they found the way because the browser himself was afraid of [always] because it affected the damage of some places. As weird we can protect our users and pay attention to what they see. I don't know how it is when you work in Safari and you have billions of users or what they have, right? It's another ball game. Some reports suggest that Safari has over 1 billion users.

My feeling is that the browser will, by definition, be much slower than the extension. We can be at the forefront. But it's also clear that if we do something that really works and that users absolutely want, browsers will eventually copy us. Before we spoke, I tried to track down some numbers on ad blocker usage over the past decade or so. I don't know if anything is certain, but my sense is that growth has leveled off over recent years. Is that how you feel too? We really don't look like that. When you ask people (if they need an advertising blocker), the number looks very high. I think you're getting deep into the mass market, so it's normal for it to level off, but the demand for it is still the same, and the usability is getting better and [cross-platform]. For example, it was not available on mobile phones for a long time. It's actually now available in Safari [on mobile]. So you can start doing that so that usage continues to grow, even just on the platform.