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How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

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Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#151

Post by insanitybit »

ndriscoll wrote: post #100
insanitybit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career. > and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I…

When I was a teenager, I found and installed Apache. WordPress apparently had existed for a year or two, but I didn't hear about it for several years after. I memorized my IP address and would link people to that, and never bought a hostname or anything. If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory…

Can we agree that "must be able to install apache" is not a good requirement for adding content to the web?

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#152

Post by charcircuit »

Zuiii wrote: post #126

> almost 500 advertising categories Wait. Doesn't that just mean that google collects 500 bits of information about you? How is that not considered an ID? I don't understand.

The browser keeps track of he top 5 categories from this list of these 629 topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before. For an epoch a site can only get at most 1 topic. The browser will return topics for up to the last 3 epochs (the site only gets data for the epochs it has called the API in)

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#153

Post by insanitybit »

lelandbatey wrote: post #121
insanitybit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm setting that up, but maybe I'm not understanding. Because to me what Google is doing is a clear attempt at maintaining the status quo of an ad-funded internet while removing the ability for fine-grained 3rd party tracking. So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to h…

It's a threat to the "free" (as in freedom) internet in that with this as the tracking mechanism, Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests. It effectively makes "serves you ads and tracks your interests" a core part of what it means for a browser (Chrome) to be a browser. Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and repo…

> Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests

But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features.

> "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government."

But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance.

> The point is that it hands over a lot of control.

But you can disable it.

> What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas?

That would suck, but:

a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous

b) That would be insane

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#154

Post by insanitybit »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #134
g-b-r wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was NOT inaccessible Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow

My experience was that it was incredibly accessible. I easily set up a web server on my home internet connection because my line was synchronous and static IPs were easily available.

> My experience was that it was incredibly accessible.

> I easily set up a web server

I can't believe you can write one after the other.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#155

Post by insanitybit »

bee_rider wrote: post #143
insanitybit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about. I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, " " is not a privacy violation.

Newspapers ran for decades without any tracking, and they had to make and distribute physical objects.

Ah yes, print media, a thriving business.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#156

Post by insanitybit »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #135
insanitybit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist. The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.

We didn't blog. We posted on USENET — for free.

OK so are proposing that we shift the internet to a completely decentralized system somehow? And we'll just kill ads in the meantime while the entire world switches off of the current infra?

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#157

Post by cpeterso »

Zuiii wrote: post #126

> almost 500 advertising categories Wait. Doesn't that just mean that google collects 500 bits of information about you? How is that not considered an ID? I don't understand.

I believe tropic interest is calculated locally by the (Google) browser, though it might be repeatable on the Google server side for users syncing their browsing history to a Google account.

The Topics API itself only returns up to three topic IDs to websites, not 500 bits for all topics. But that still gives trackers up to 500 * 499 * 498 (124,251,000) topic combinations that can be paired with other fingerprintable user information like GeoIP, language, browser version, and operating system.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#158

Post by insanitybit »

g-b-r wrote: post #86
insanitybit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist. The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.

It was NOT inaccessible Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow

Geocities had a tiny fraction of the users that forums attract these days and was not free for a major portion of its lifetime.

All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#159

Post by chii »

flurie wrote: post #146
chii wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did start advertising chrome, but the speed of chrome (and stability) was not fake and it won over the early adopters. Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise. May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.

There's a feature I use heavily that I cannot get in Chrome: Multi-Account Containers[1]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

unfortunately, such a feature is so niche that almost nobody cares about it, and so does not move the needle in the fight against chrome.

According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#160

Post by [deleted] »

kevincox wrote: post #65
cebert wrote: post #53

> “If you just clicked the big blue button that said “Got it” to make the pop-up go away, you opted yourself in.” The screenshots in the article clearly illustrate a concerning trend: users are often subtly coerced into opting into certain features or settings without full awareness. This usually happens when they hurriedly click a prominent button like 'Got it' just to dismiss an annoying pop-up. It highlights a sig…

Yeah, this is gross. "Got it" sounds like they were just telling me something, not me agreeing to let them share my personal information. That dialog was clearly designed to make users click "Yes" while giving some sort of ass-cover that they got consent even though they clearly didn't.

[deleted]
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