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Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

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Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#141

Post by d1zzy »

easton wrote: post #125
ogre_codes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome has nearly limitless options for monetization. They do? Apple gives away a pretty decent browser with their OS. Microsoft gives away a version of Chrome with their OS (and for MacOS). Most Linux versions ship with variants of Chromium. The Chrome source which is a fork of WebKit which is in turn a fork of KHTML... is Open Source. Chrome can't really be sold. What exactly could "Chrome" the company do to make…

Chrome already has an enterprise version with support and management tools (mostly for Chrome OS), that plus donations from Microsoft/Google could make it profitable for the team required. (Although it'd probably end up being a foundation like Mozilla)

The question is: can that income fund the Google-style salaries and benefits that are currently being payed for people working on it?

Otherwise lots of existing employees may not want to be part of this split company. If that is a large loss of talent (think veterans with lots of experience) that could hurt the quality (security, stability) and velocity of the project resulting in much less interest from those companies to pay the Chrome company for their services. What I'd suspect at that point is that Google might just fork it and develop it internally for internal use only (it's going to be hard to trust a third party browser to access internal confidential/critical resources when said third party has trouble maintaining high quality engineering talent). We're talking about state actors here that could have much easier time attacking a smaller Chrome company to introduce data exfiltration code.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#142

Post by madrox »

I hope no one is saying Privacy Sandbox is worse than third party cookies, or is trusting this article to form an opinion about it. Web advertising was a $319 billion dollar industry in 2019. Does anyone wonder who may be lobbying their government to scrutinize Google and offer themselves for interviews for articles like this? Does anyone think the result of beating up Project Sandbox will be more radical privacy protection?

No, I don't think this article has anything really to do with a better privacy outcome and everything to do with watering down Google's stance to something more status quo for the advertising industry.

There are no actual critiques of Privacy Sandbox's APIs here. There's no mention of what critics stand to lose if Privacy Sandbox becomes the standard. There's merely hand wringing of "but do you trust Google?" Everyone who's made themselves available for quoting in this article is a web advertising professional, including the ones who come off as not[1][2]. None of them care about you.

[1] James Rosewell is cited as director of "Marketers for an Open Web." He's also the CEO of a company that specializes in device detection. His LinkedIn headline reads "THE Fastest and Most Accurate Device Detection = more profitable websites"

[2] Alan Chapell is sarcastic about Google attempting to do this openly through the w3c. He's cited as running a privacy law firm. Their web site says they represent tech companies navigating privacy issues. They aren't actual privacy advocates. https://chapellassociates.com/

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#143

Post by aabhay »

nr2x wrote: post #139
adriancr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasingly unethical and invasive fingerprinting techniques to remain competitive. ... or serve cookies via first-party subdomain ... Also, hasn't Safari already killed third party cookies?

The things people don't know about third-party Javascript and "first-party" cookies...

How would third party JavaScript fingerprint users? Only if there’s a backend data broker aggregating identities based on a universal token (e.g. email). Or one of those super shady tech wizardry techniques like timing OpenGL calls.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#144

Post by lmkg »

ElvisTrout wrote: post #93
ttt0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't contain any PII. Even if that was the case, this is a bullshit argument. They don't need any PII, it's just more fingerprinting. They already have all the personal information they'll ever need by using all the other means.

Surely fingerprinting is PII? It allows for mosaic identification.

Fingerprinting doesn't reveal an individual's name or passport number, so it's not PII. That's why PII is not a very useful concept in general, and why claims about privacy safeguards that over-focus on PII should be met with some skepticism.

The laws are catching up this in regard. GDPR uses "personal data" and CCPA uses "personal information," both of which more generally refer to data that identifies an individual.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#145

Post by ttt0 »

ska wrote: post #108
ttt0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, are fonts installed on your system PII? Because it can be used for fingerprinting. But I don't know the precise definition, so maybe you're right.

Perhaps a reasonable line to draw would be that if the content of the information is enough to fingerprint, the it is PII (regardless if broken into many messages) and the individual data doesn't matter.

If we talk purely about "reasonable", I don't think it's even possible to draw any line, besides something obvious like unique user identifiers. It's hard to predict what data can be used for fingerprinting until someone actually does it, just like it's hard to predict what bugs are actually possible to exploit. I could never predict some of those things being used for that and yet here we are. So it can be a cat-and-mouse type of situation. And some of that information is probably legit useful for purposes other than tracking.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#146

Post by minsc__and__boo »

ulber wrote: post #73

This post got me into looking up what Google's privacy sandbox actually is. One proposal I found quite interesting was TURTLEDOVE, which proposes to move ad bidding onto the user device [1]. The current proposal of course uses bidding logic delivered by the ad seller. However, if this were to gain wide adoption, the step to imposing user control over bidding gets a bit smaller. Imagine being able to tell advertisers…

Seems like they're storing the user based stuff from here:

https://adssettings.google.com/

in the browser, and letting publishers configure their own bidding logic based on that data.

Not sure how that is going to play out since publishers want clicks and users don't want ads.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#147

Post by dleslie »

madrox wrote: post #142

I hope no one is saying Privacy Sandbox is worse than third party cookies, or is trusting this article to form an opinion about it. Web advertising was a $319 billion dollar industry in 2019. Does anyone wonder who may be lobbying their government to scrutinize Google and offer themselves for interviews for articles like this? Does anyone think the result of beating up Project Sandbox will be more radical privacy pro…

Ok, I'll bite. I don't trust Google, and let's assume that they will always be a malicious adversary.

Given that, why should I not be skeptical of their Privacy Sandbox initiative?

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#148

Post by ogre_codes »

gcblkjaidfj wrote: post #122
ogre_codes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome has nearly limitless options for monetization. They do? Apple gives away a pretty decent browser with their OS. Microsoft gives away a version of Chrome with their OS (and for MacOS). Most Linux versions ship with variants of Chromium. The Chrome source which is a fork of WebKit which is in turn a fork of KHTML... is Open Source. Chrome can't really be sold. What exactly could "Chrome" the company do to make…

> Chrome can't really be sold. Right. Now try to use that top right "user" icon on your chrome window to log in as a user that is not from a google account.

No idea what icon you are speaking of. I don't use Chrome much and don't log into it when I do. I certainly don't think anyone is going to pay for the privilege.

Re: Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

#149

Post by paulryanrogers »

baybal2 wrote: post #129
ttt0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't contain any PII. Even if that was the case, this is a bullshit argument. They don't need any PII, it's just more fingerprinting. They already have all the personal information they'll ever need by using all the other means.

Yep, they have GREASE TLS bytes, TLS resume ticket, RLZ value, X-Geo header, UA header, JS APIs with persistent random values (which they do indeed use on adsense! This is why you get surprise WebGL code seemingly doing nonsense once a while in adsense ads) This cannot be a coincidence. They packed Chrome with fingerprints to work around GDPR by combining fingerprints on their side.

Doesn't that risk massive fines if proven? Like a percentage of all revenue?
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