In this story: engineers can't come to a conclusion because they are trying to solve a political problem instead of an engineering problem.
It's the song that never ends/ it just goes on and on/
my friend...
A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
221–229 of 229 posts
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#222A slightly orthogonal way to see this debate is that the standards that became dominant (tcp/ip, http, html, cookies, smtp, js, etc) became that way specifically because they were inferior in specific ways, such as privacy. This gave the opportunity to build varying levels of user exploitation into any desirable application without explicit consent or decision to pay for it. An Internet built on superior user-empower…
Ding, ding, ding.
Go to a convention. ask people about why we don't make software im a way that empowers users without a crippling dependence being created, or inflicting on users a leaky or otherwise insecire experience, and watch the room clam up.
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative to giving your money to one of the largest tax-dodgers on the planet is a $30 raspberry pi with "pi-hole" installed. Browsing on my phone at home with all those ad networks blocked okay... until you go outside your home network and get all the ads again. It's almost made my stop using my phone outside of my home network.
Apple's effective tax rate is actually higher than many of its peers, and higher than the sector on average. All multinationals need strong tax enforcement, but this isn't actually one where Apple is really any worse than others (and better than many). https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AAPL/explorer/effect_tax_rate
That's fine. There just seemed to be an unnecessarily large amount of tugging of Apple's dick in the top of the thread, and I wanted to suggest an alternative.
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you call it when a company makes a change to its product in one market where it has large market share that drives its competitors in another market out if business? Or put another way, do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence? IANAL, but even I can see that making changes to Chrome that impact advertising is risky even if you ignore Google's own…
> do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence? Considering that ad blocking extensions still exist, yes. The browser (user agent) is supposed to act on the behalf of the user, not the remote server. It's not required to use cookies, display ads or run malicious code. On what grounds would an ad company sue Google for a change in Chromium that enhances the us…
Look, you can go into Chrome today and disable third party cookies via a setting. There may be a way to create an extension that does this change automatically.
Almost anyone other than Google can make this change without major legal worries, but because Google is in both the ads market and a browser vendor they can't rock the boat.
On what grounds? There are businesses whose only product is targeting information for ads. If they can't get the data they need then they can't produce a product and will go out of business.
Hopefully Mozilla and Apple can start pushing some of the tracking replacement technologies since they don't have their hands tied like Google.
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you call it when a company makes a change to its product in one market where it has large market share that drives its competitors in another market out if business? Or put another way, do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence? IANAL, but even I can see that making changes to Chrome that impact advertising is risky even if you ignore Google's own…
> do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence? Not disagreeing, but ad companies attempting to sue Google out of existence would be worth watching.
The trick is the ad companies can use anti-trust to get the governments of the world to foot the bill. See the recent issue with the CMA in the UK:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-to-have-key-oversight...
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds Well, that’s ominous. Presumably the plan is to close source Chrome or do some DRM thing to prevent sites from rendering if the Privacy Sandbox has been tampered with? Great.
Reading the rest of the post, they're talking about fingerprinting: "By undermining the business model of many ad-supported websites, blunt approaches to cookies encourage the use of opaque techniques such as fingerprinting (an invasive workaround to replace cookies), which can actually reduce user privacy and control." "At the same time, we’re developing techniques to detect and mitigate covert tracking and workarou…
"Workarounds" is also the wording they use on the Privacy Sandbox page: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...
("Mitigating workarounds: As we’re removing the ability to do cross-site tracking with cookies, we need to ensure that developers take the well-lit path of the new functionality rather than attempt to track users through some other means. ...")
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#227> companies that use cross-site tracking for things like website optimization OK, I was hoping someone already addressed this, but apparently not. What "website optimization" requires cross-site tracking? Is there any real application for cross-site tracking besides advertising? I honestly would like to know.
CDNs maybe? Back when people used jQuery, an enormous amount of traffic went to Google, ripe for tracking, and you got the small benefit of not having to download the same version of jQuery so often.
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#228What it says: "a privacy war is raging inside the W3C.
What I read: "why you should keep your ad-blockers and script-blockers properly configured and updated".
Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the answer will be paying a bit more for internet and having ISPs forward that fee onto websites.
You do realize that your answer is based on the premise that your ISP knows what and when are you visiting and the duration of that, right?
I mean for websites to get paid at all this has to be the case. It could by your browser, os, whatever.