I've read an interesting comment on lobste.rs that this is basically a way to try to circumvent GDPR.
Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
271–280 of 435 posts
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did we read the same article? It came across as very pro-privacy and anti-tracking to me. It’s well written in the sense that it explains the issue to a general audience without resorting to breathless scare mongering.
"We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence) reads like so much sleeper propaganda for The Selfish Ledger style abuses. I don't think any discussion of the trade-offs between privacy and tracking is complete unless the horrifying abuses of tracking are also discussed, like government contractors spying on people without cause.
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Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does that pass for journalism? I think it passes for a press release disguised as a news article.
And that passes for a comment. Google didn't write a press release that raises questions - insightful ones that I hardly ever see in other coverage - about their privacy practices and recommends competitors such as Firefox and Brave.
Give me a break. It is delusional to believe that corporations do not regularly float press releases to journalists, which then get recycled into articles, which sometimes include a tiny bit of original research.
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't their business model mostly: Having the most popular search engine?
That doesn't make money. Have the most popular search engine so they can sell more ads is more like it.
Also so they can basically shape web standards and ecosystems however they want. Websites will do literally anything to stay listed and relevant in google search. Google does this by shaping a web that serves ads and thereby makes them more money
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#275Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did we read the same article? It came across as very pro-privacy and anti-tracking to me. It’s well written in the sense that it explains the issue to a general audience without resorting to breathless scare mongering.
"We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence) reads like so much sleeper propaganda for The Selfish Ledger style abuses. I don't think any discussion of the trade-offs between privacy and tracking is complete unless the horrifying abuses of tracking are also discussed, like government contractors spying on people without cause.
> "We need to revolutionize how we think about our data and what value it holds" (last sentence)
The last line of the article for me is different: “We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.” (Emphasis mine)
Which in context:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Is a very clear pro-privacy statement to me. This is our data and is owned by us and we should revolutionize how we think about that.
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#277Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if yo…
Remember when the :visited modifier on an tag was a thing?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:visited
And third-party tracking websites would load their websites up with a bunch of hidden anchors and then through JS read the visited state of these websites to get an accurate fix on a person's identity, or at least of their (relevant) browser history?
And how this modifier was removed ASAP once people realised its abuse potential?
Basically Google thought this was a good idea after all, and is bringing a "coarse-grained" version of it back.
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
You all voted for this.
All the annoyed people in this thread, reading this post from their Google Chrome window. And every time I mention this, I get a ton of excuses, from people that should know better, that they can't leave Google. Boo woo. There might be exceptions, but to the large majority of other lazy tech users, this is on you. Enshittification doesn't happen in a vacuum. You are passive actors to a shittier web.
I'm annoyed from Firefox because Firefox is currently terrible and not implementing web components and PWAs the right way so they don't become a headless browser for other apps.
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#279I am against this and think it's pretty unconscionable, but I will say this in defense of Google collecting my data: Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run. That being said, it's been proven over…
Isn't their business model mostly: Having the most popular search engine?
Search is the moat.
Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
#280We have a few options for monetizing on the web: 1. Sell stuff (e-commerce, subscriptions, services). 2. Sell ads (every website that's free except Wikipedia). 3. Ask for donations (Wikipedia). I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die. To sell ads, websites need to be able to…
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people…
Wasn't Google's initial pitch that it would provide ads selectively based on the content of the page? All this demographics and individual tracking part in modern metrics seems to be mostly misleading.
For decades, ads were sold based on media analysis – and it worked well. There is nothing that says that it would work unconditionally with tracking only. You may even miss your most important potential customers entirely with tracking, since your product may be lacking general exposure. You may be also missing a broader cultural feedback, which is what sells most products in the end. (Most ads try to assign a cultural vector to the product, or to associate a product with an existing one, this is a major mechanism. You may require a certain amount of social resonance and common references to achieve this. It may well be, that this dysfunctionality of targeted advertising is what gave birth to the phenomenon of the influencer.)