Washington Post: “Google announced it will begin the process of getting rid of long-standing ad trackers on its Android operating system, upending how advertising and data-collection work on phones and tablets used by more than 2.5 billion people around the world. Right now, Google assigns special IDs to each Android device, allowing advertisers to build profiles of what people do on their phones and serve them highly targeted ads. Google will begin testing alternatives to those IDs this year and eventually remove them completely, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google said the changes will improve privacy for Android users, limiting the massive amounts of data that app developers collect from people using the platform. But the move also could give Google even more power over digital advertising, and is likely to deepen concerns regulators have already expressed about the company’s competitive practices. Google is the most dominant digital advertising company in the world, owning many of the tools advertisers use to reach people online, as well as selling billions of dollars in ad space on search results and on YouTube videos. It made $61 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone…”
See also CNN: “Google Analytics, the world’s most widely used web analytics service developed by Alphabet’s Google  risks giving U.S. intelligence services access to French website users’ data, France’s watchdog CNIL said on Thursday. In a decision targeting an unnamed French website manager, the data privacy regulator — one of the most vocal and influential in Europe — said the U.S. tech giant hadn’t taken sufficient measures to guarantee data privacy rights under European Union regulation when data was transferred between Europe and the United States. “These (measures) are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data to U.S. intelligence services,” the regulator said in a statement…”