Google Has Continued Its Growth in Europe Post-GDPR, While the Prevalence of Other Trackers Has Been Cut ⇥ techcrunch.com

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

For the GDPR analysis, the team compared the prevalence of trackers one month before and one month after the introduction of the regulation, looking at the top 2,000 domains visited by EU or US residents.

On the tracker numbers front, they found that the average number of trackers per page dropped by almost 4% for EU web users from April to July.

Whereas the opposite was true in the US, with the average number of trackers per page rose by more than 8 percent over the same period.

[…]

Summing up their findings, Cliqz and Ghostery write: “For users this means that while the number of trackers asking for access to their data is decreasing, a tiny few (including Google) are getting even more of their data.”

This builds upon and somewhat echoes earlier reporting that GDPR would actually help Google and Facebook compared to their smaller competitors. That’s not surprising: GDPR requires individual companies to get an explicit opt-in from users for ad targeting and tracking, and that’s a lot easier to do when you’re Google or Facebook. It’s also something that can be addressed through greater antitrust enforcement, if the E.U. wishes to pursue more direct targeting of the mass surveillance business models of those two companies.