Yahoo CEO’s Plans Coincide With Google’s Privacy Policy Change

Elaborating, Thompson said data could help Yahoo personalize the user experience across Yahoo’s properties, leading to increased time spent on those properties and improved performance numbers for Yahoo’s advertisers. “Nobody’s done that yet on the Web,” he said.

However, roughly an hour before Thompson’s statement, Google announced plans that will consolidate its privacy policies and allow the company to link user data across properties for “a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” wrote Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering, in a company blog post.

Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC, said that while the companies’ plans mirror each other, he doesn’t expect Thompson’s agenda to dramatically improve Yahoo’s overall business.