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A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

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Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#181

Post by Terretta »

petters wrote: post #139
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Apple is a for profit company. On the side they are collecting your data for themselves and blocking others from getting it. Their profits come from products and services. Google is a for profit company. On the side the offer products and services. Their profits come from selling your data to others. Yes, I personally trust one over the other in this case. Although I don’t know what “for profit” has to do with a…

> Google is a for profit company. On the side the offer products and services. Their profits come from selling your data to others. Google does not sell the data to others. (In fact, much of Google's profits would remain intact even without any user data. That is the great thing about search ads -- the user tells you exactly what they want. There is no need to guess)

And yet…

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#182

Post by mehlmao »

breakfastduck wrote: post #173
fartcannon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, good, but you traded one bad apple for another. Apple is in the process of locking down freedom. And while you might not be tracked by Google, your quality of life in a closed ecosystem is just as bad in other ways. How many people have to contend with iCloud endlessly begging for money because they took a few photos of their child? Isn't iCloud data backed up on Chinese servers? I'm pretty sure that means you'…

Where on earth are you pulling the 'begging for money' from? I've never seen that happen before. You are ultimately arguing that a business protecting my data, while also using it themselves to sell me their own products, is just as bad in other ways as a company taking my data and using it to manipulate election results, to sell to shady companies and to market the shit out of me.

iOS now hawks iCloud very aggressively. They tricked my iPad-using grandmother into paying for a storage plan she didn't need.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#183

Post by jefftk »

hedora wrote: post #113
jefftk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really separate things: Chrome has said removing third party cookies is dependent on finding good replacements. This goes back at least to https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-... : After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy,…

> 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 workarounds by launching new anti-fingerprinting measures to discourage these kinds of deceptive and intrusive techniques"

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#184

Post by pjmlp »

howaboutnope wrote: post #138
fouc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the average users there's only two choices, Windows or Mac, and Chrome-based or Firefox (or if they're on a Mac they get Safari as a 3rd choice).

The average user doesn't exist. It's an abstraction used by techies to make arguments they cannot defend.

The average user are all those people that are yet to bother with GNU/Linux desktop, despite the exodus migrations being profethized at each macOS or Windows version.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#185

Post by pjmlp »

trothamel wrote: post #81

Does the W3C even matter anymore? I thought WHAT-WG did most of the standardization nowadays, and W3C was left deciding what to rubber stamp and what not to.

Actually Google does most of the standardization nowadays, and then Apple adopts what it feels like.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#186

Post by jarofgreen »

marketingtech wrote: post #34

It's easy to mock the pettiness of all parties described here, and it's common for people on this forum to take absolutist stances with regards to privacy/advertising, but it's also important to recognize that these arguments will actually define the future of the internet for the average user. There are trillion dollar companies on both sides of the argument, and their eventual compromise will establish the defaults…

> There are also two fundamental components of the Big Tech debate at odds with each other here - privacy and competition.

The article explicitly talks about how this is a false dichotomy.

> Regulators in the U.K., he said, had bought the ad industry's argument that privacy and competition are on a collision course. That, he said, is a false choice. "They could have required everyone to not access that data, Google included, which would have been a net benefit for competition and privacy," Soltani said.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#187

Post by miki123211 »

dhosek wrote: post #49

> 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.

Yes, when one website relies on the fact that you're logged in somewhere else.

Thing easily being able to add embedded Youtube videos to your watchlist, adding favorite articles to Pocket, being able to pay with 1 click using a payment method saved somewhere else, and so on.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#188

Post by gwbas1c »

notriddle wrote: post #117
gwbas1c wrote: post #88

Honestly, this makes me wonder if the browser manufacturers will just "take their ball and go home." It's probably easier for them to just get together outside of the W3C and make up a new standards committee. From what I understand, nothing in the W3C is binding, so there would be no repercussions whatsoever.

They already did that, forming WHATWG.

But the browser vendors are actively participating in the W3C. That's clearly described in the article.

What I'm referring to is the browser vendors leaving the W3C and forming an alternate group.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#189

Post by mavhc »

Terretta wrote: post #180
deadmutex wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their profits come from selling your data to others It is a common misconception that FB and Google sell user data. E.g. see https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 "Google has also played a leadership role in creating industry standards for transparency and data protection. More than a dozen privacy employees at Google spoke to WIRED about how they make sense of the paradox of their work, insisting that ther…

They absolutely sell the multi-feature profile of you from that data, and the data merchants absolutely tie it together then resell it to everyone. In turn, a bank can make or break your ability to buy a home with it. Fintechs helping make credit decisions get that from both, directly and indirectly, and even better when doing a bit of correlation for the bank. Microsoft and Amazon no real help, Apple even less. Note…

So you're saying that by tracking people we can avoid people buying homes they can't afford and causing a market crash?

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#190

Post by brainbag »

zikduruqe wrote: post #169
samplatt wrote: post #100

Earlier 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.

I used to run a Pi-Hole for a long time, but then I realized I was trading my day to day tech job, to screwing around with Pi-Hole (along with other RPi's in my house) on my personal time. And yes, I run a WireGuard VPN too and could/have turn on WG to tunnel back to my Pi-Hole. Switched over to NextDNS, so that my ad blocking is on the macro network too. I'm satisfied. My wife is not, since her trashy "click here" l…

Isn't that just shifting the tracking to another site? Now nextdns.io knows everything that you're doing.
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