How does marketing use anonymized consumer data while respecting privacy?

By targeting groups (cohorts) instead of tracking individuals — grouping users with similar interests, processing data on-device, and reporting only aggregate, segment-level insights.

In the source's account, GDPR and similar regulations pushed digital advertisers away from individual-level tracking toward privacy-preserving alternatives that still deliver personalization:

• Cohort-based targeting — group users with similar interests rather than profiling each person. The named example is Google's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which assigns a browser to an interest "cohort" instead of using individual identifiers.
• Contextual targeting — match ads to the content of the page, not to a tracked person.
• On-device processing — keep the raw behavioural data local on the user's device.
• Aggregate insights — marketers see trends and patterns at the segment level, never needing individual-level tracking.

Why it matters: it shows the utility-vs-confidentiality trade-off resolved in favour of "good-enough" group-level signals — you can personalise without holding a dossier on each individual.