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Google’s GDPR Workaround

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Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#471

Post by panarky »

close04 wrote: post #426
panarky wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, definitely. And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.

> while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”. The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in m…

> the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs

By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google?

If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns.

Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#473

Post by trpc »

crtlaltdel wrote: post #462

brave is incentivized to push this narrative, accurate or inaccurate as it may be. i am not ad-tech guru, nor digital marketer. i do know that brave's entire premise hangs on traditional ad-tech strategy remaining static, consumer sentiment around "big tech" to sour and a groundswell of "privacy focused consumers" to materialize. that groundswell is their identified target market for their product.

What's funnier is that Brave """product""" is nothing more but a theme over Chrome that any 12 yo kid can do in 2 hours, an adblocker based on FOSS blacklists and some compilation flags that prevent Google from enabling its own server features and tracking system and redirecting the tracking system to their own servers. Yet their entire PR and marketing is based on "Google is evil!". In any other industry this scam would have been shut down and the management would have been sued to probably jail time. But in tech, many things are blurry.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#474

Post by danis1 »

crtlaltdel wrote: post #462

brave is incentivized to push this narrative, accurate or inaccurate as it may be. i am not ad-tech guru, nor digital marketer. i do know that brave's entire premise hangs on traditional ad-tech strategy remaining static, consumer sentiment around "big tech" to sour and a groundswell of "privacy focused consumers" to materialize. that groundswell is their identified target market for their product.

Which is the reason Brave is in a good position to do this kind of work. They represent a growing portion of web users, and their research helps to give these users a voice.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#475

Post by nocturnial »

gundmc wrote: post #464
unityByFreedom wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is so wordy, this is what I got, > Google claims to prevent the many companies ... from combining their profiles about those visitors > Brave’s new evidence reveals that Google allowed not only one additional party, but many, to match with Google identifiers. The evidence further reveals that Google allowed multiple parties to match their identifiers for the data subject with each other. BTW, many commen…

I take exception with Brave's phrasing here. Essentially, Google assigns an anonymized identifier to a user and sends that to prospective ad buyers. The idea is that the ad buyer can use this to target ads to people who have visited their site as they browse other areas of the internet participating in Google's auction. This is called remarketing. An example. You go to footlocker.com and put a pair of sneakers in you…

> essentially, Google assigns an anonymized identifier to a user and sends that to prospective ad buyers.

If it's anonymized then how could they send targeted ads to you? I think you're using a slightly different version of the word anonymous.

How I use the word anonymous it means, roughly speaking, that it can't be traced back to you. Or in this context, google wouldn't be selling anonymized data to third parties who in turn could contact you.

If they were selling data like X persons like product Y more then Z, there would be less of an uproar about this.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#476

Post by rjf72 »

drusepth wrote: post #441
ummonk wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been absurd. Large companies have way more code and features in general which need to be checked for compliance, whereas small shops with small sets of data and features will have a far easier time complying with GDPR.

Large companies have the means to pay for the manpower (lawyers/consultants, developers, etc) to certify compliance with GDPR. Small companies often don't. I paid $2K for my first GDPR consulting session for a $7K MRR app and was quoted ~$25K for consulting while I would personally implement what needed to be done. $25K is nothing for a large company, but it's prohibitively expensive for a lot of small companies. Thi…

Another issue is that as a small company you generally lack the resources to effectively contest violations. Google can, and will, drag these things out in court for years. And ironically for free. Their legal costs are going to be covered by inflation on the fines themselves. 2% inflation on a $1 billion fine reduces it by $20 million a year. And also factor in the interest Google is earning on that $1 billion on top of the 2% 'principal' reduction per year.

The whole penalty system is quite silly. The fines destroy small companies who are the ones struggling to comply, and do little more than offer extremely gentle pokes on the wrist for megacorps that have relatively unlimited resources available for complete compliance, if they actually wanted to comply.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#477

Post by annoyingnoob »

rtbthrowaway wrote: post #313

I've worked in the sector for years and honestly thought this was well documented, common knowledge: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/cookie-g... The only thing Google did in regards to GPRR was limit the number of parties in RTB they're including by default for syncing to a "trusted set" of parties.

I think the silent/invisible nature of cookie sync'ing is what upsets people when they discover it. T

he diagrams in your link show a single hop for the 302, in my experience that can be many hops going between different advertisers. The same thing happens on non-google platforms, like TradeDesk and others.

The sync scenario can make it next to impossible to delete cookies when those cookies can be rebuilt using data from others.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#478

Post by frenchyatwork »

halr9000 wrote: post #459
ggg3 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is the "workaround" to the gdpr the article badly describes (probably because brave upcoming ad network will do the same but more workaroundily) now those are used to match a 3rd party id. you just need a gdpr_workaround schema in your data base with two columns user-id, google-random-id with N-1 records indexed both ways. gdpr has restrictions on pin pointing a single person. this is effectively doing that, bu…

Well, the “right” workaround is an opt-in system. But that would drastically reduce the number of qualified ad prospects, reducing their wholesale value, killing the online ad business, drying up the websites themselves who exist for this revenue (some/many of which are trash, but not nearly all). I don’t think we can have it both ways, or at least it is very difficult and we don’t have a great compromise solution.

I don't think the EU, or consumers in general, are terribly interested in "compromising" with the ad-tech industry.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#479

Post by Despegar »

joefkelley wrote: post #421

I'm an engineer who has worked on ad systems like this and I'm really struggling to make sense of this article - what hope does a layman have? Here's my understanding: Google runs real-time bidding ad auctions by sending anonymized profiles to marketers, who bid on those impressions. The anonymous id used in each auction was the same for each bidder, which is in violation of GDPR. If Google were to send different ids…

The answer is: RTB is illegal and we're just waiting for the courts to decide on it.

Re: Google’s GDPR Workaround

#480

Post by panpanna »

rjf72 wrote: post #468
panpanna wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU should ignore the fines this time and start an "information campaign" regarding behavior of Google and others. I bet that hurts Google 10 times more.

Governments are likely walking a much finer line than we might imagine. Imagine they carried out your idea. The EU is a political organization manned by a large number of mostly professional politicians. Google is world's largest data harvesting and advertising company whose products are used, on a daily basis, by a pretty sizable chunk of our entire species' population. Imagine if Google decided to fight back. Who w…

I disagree. People were not aware of the shenanigans Facebook was pulling before the media outrage. Now they are and many are leaving the platform.

Exactly how would Google fight back? Kill Android? Close down YouTube??

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