AI plays a big role in this Yahoo announcement, which describes how they’ll use it to put anonymous website visitors into audiences based on how closely they resemble identified users.  As they describe it, Next-Gen Audiences “considers a mix of real-time signals received on the bid request, including content, location, weather, device type, and more” to build anonymous audiences that are more effective than content-based targeting alone.  No cookies or persistent user profiles are involved.  Today’s news is they’ve extended this from in-app inventory to web advertising.

The head-spinning world of advertising privacy got even dizzier today when Google announced a “multi-year initiative” to deploy Privacy Sandbox on Android.  Heaven knows what it really means but the general idea is they’re trying to limit sharing of personal data while still supporting some ad targeting.  Don’t confuse this announcement with one made last November, which recently resurfaced, about letting publishers share pseudonymized first-party IDs with programmatic ad bidders through something called Encrypted Signals for Publishers.

Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.