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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

#311

Post by swiley »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #163
Aerroon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worry is that one day Google may decide that they are going to severely abuse my data. If they build up the idea over the years that they have your data then the jump to abusing it will be much smaller.

Then ask them to delete it all. You, like most people, probably won't ask - because it's extremely convenient to have Google store all of this data. But if you think the upside isn't worth the risk, just ask and they will destroy it all for you. You don't even have to claim you live in the EU or California or somewhere else with at data protection law. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7660719

You'll probably have the choice of abandoning your account or consenting to let them use at least the new data. I know a lot of people who have decided they've had enough only to realize that so much of their life has been integrated into their Google/Apple account that they can't actually leave.

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

#312

Post by jefftk »

ogre_codes wrote: post #57

Google's way of leveraging their browser dominance to use 3rd party cookies as a way to gain competitive advantage: Step 1: Implement a whole new browser functionality where Google alone can track people. Step 2: Eliminate 3rd party cookies so Google's competitors have to create increasingly unethical and invasive fingerprinting techniques to remain competitive. Step 3: Increase advertising rates since they are the o…

> Step 1: Implement a whole new browser functionality where Google alone can track people.

Have a look at the concrete proposals: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

It's all proposed web standards, none of which privilege Google ad serving.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)

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

#314

Post by jefftk »

williamscales wrote: post #248
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…

That would be interesting. One option that might be more practical would be to enable users to buy out the auction with a limit order. Users could say “I’ll pay at most 50 cents to view this ad-free.” Most of the time users who want to avoid ads end up paying a fraction of a cent. Sometimes users pay a little more. And occasionally somebody actually wants to target a user so they offer an actually valuable bid.

> One option that might be more practical would be to enable users to buy out the auction with a limit order.

Google built this, but users turned out not to be interested in it and they discontinued it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

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

#315

Post by jefftk »

IanSanders wrote: post #233
presentation wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that inherently harmful? Doesn't charging a large sum for something offered by an ad mean, that the ad provided something of value to the user? My issue with personalized ads isn't that users end up spending money on what they offer; it's the potential for the collection of that pervasive data to negatively impact the user and broader society.

>How is that inherently harmful? Aside from collected data being used for other purposes besides advertisement, when efficient, it allows charging the individual more than they "should" be paying. If an industry "knows" that your washing machine broke, it "knows" that you would be easier manipulated into paying a higher price (sorry for the simplification and the amount of quote marks). >Doesn't charging a large sum…

> Aside from collected data being used for other purposes besides advertisement

In the case of the Turtledove API proposal (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove) the collected data stays in the browser and can only be used for privately targeting ads.

(Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)

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

#316

Post by svieira »

ma2rten wrote: post #224
smichel17 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add a third option: neither! Seriously, I've had 3rd party cookies disabled four years and almost nothing breaks. The last time I remember needing to enable them was some online homework system that came with a math textbook.

I feel like there are some misunderstandings in this thread. Let me summarize my understanding: Safari has effectively disabled third party cookies. Nothing broke. Chrome has announced that they will do the same in 2022. However, unlike Apple, Google doesn't want to cannibalize the ad industry so they decided to introduce this Privacy Sandbox which allows targeted advertising without sending a personal identifier to…

Actually, some things _did_ break and required wonky work-arounds (redirect through three top-level domains to set cookies so you can show the user a page composed from three different systems embedded widgets) and at some point we'll have to make it work better. But while Apple and company are aware of this use case they don't have a solution that can't be _also_ used by ad companies as well as integrators ... so it gets harder to integrate on the front end, unless you trust all the things being integrated implicitly (which you don't)

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

#317

Post by jefftk »

theshrike79 wrote: post #231
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…

> 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? You do know that Google is a web advertising company first? If they're proposing something, you can be damned sure that it was vetted first by people who know how to use it for ad tracking - because that's literally their…

> Chrome will never: ban 3rd party cookies

"Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years [from January 2020]." -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

Want to bet on whether Chrome still supports third-party cookies, say, by the end of 2023?

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

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

#318

Post by easton »

d1zzy wrote: post #141
easton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

Microsoft will probably have much of the high-quality engineering talent upstreaming work from Edge. Maybe Google will fork it, but nation-state actors haven't compromised Firefox (to our knowledge) even at its peak, why would they have more luck with Chrome?

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

#319

Post by jefftk »

ROARosen wrote: post #185
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…

> I hope no one is saying Privacy Sandbox is worse than third party cookies It doesn't need to be worse for it to be unacceptable to privacy-concerned folks which don't trust Google. It is just about the same to them since an untrustable entity like Google is stewarding it. Which BTW makes it worse since the solution is basically putting trust in Google which just brings on more and undefined privacy issues.

The argument in the linked post is not that Privacy Sandbox is "unacceptable to privacy-concerned folks which don't trust Google" but "unacceptable to ad tech companies who want to be able to continue to use third-party cookies".

> the solution is basically putting trust in Google

None of the privacy sandbox proposals require trusting Google: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

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