Google Ads sent an email out to advertisers (a few days ago I think) introducing their workaround.
Normally clicks have a "gclid" query param. Google is introducing 2 new query params to somehow attribute clicks using modeling + machine learning (somehow).
Edit: here's a detailed description of how Google is attempting to track conversions using machine learning. I have no idea how this could possibly work without some kind of fingerprinting or user profiling or IP address. Almost feels like "modeled conversions" powered by ML is a way to do fingerprinting without explicitly having an algorithm that blatantly uses fingerprinting.
It is not a work around in the sense that they will be able to track you, they won't.
What Google tells them that if they use Analytics 4, they can use modelling to give attribution of convertion. In this case, attribution means not fingerprinting but percentage of people that was converted thanks to Ads. For other analytic engines they set the fields as 'not set'.
They day that in their models they aggregate data as geo, IP, and others and they won't give the fingerprinting data. The only problem is that they don't give details on the privacy preservation of their ML models. This means that if they fuck it up and give to much information, someone could try to reverse the aggregation (like doing a deconvolution) and do some fingerprinting.
Easy work around is encrypt the data into the path decode the data server side and do a server to server beacon call. no ad blocker technique is going to be able to block it. apple is just making the industry step through more hoops. all the beacon calls are going to server to server before this.
Normally clicks have a "gclid" query param. Google is introducing 2 new query params to somehow attribute clicks using modeling + machine learning (somehow).
Edit: here's a detailed description of how Google is attempting to track conversions using machine learning. I have no idea how this could possibly work without some kind of fingerprinting or user profiling or IP address. Almost feels like "modeled conversions" powered by ML is a way to do fingerprinting without explicitly having an algorithm that blatantly uses fingerprinting.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10710245?sjid=85...
Edit 2: The new query params are "gbraid" and "wbraid". Googling those turns up more details.