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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-want-your-data dept.

What can we rid the world of, thinks Google... Poverty? Disease? Inequality? Yeah, but first: Third-party cookies – and classic user-agent strings:

On Tuesday, Google published an update on its Privacy Sandbox proposal, a plan thoroughly panned last summer as a desperate attempt to redefine privacy in a way that's compatible with the ad slinger's business.

In a blog post, Justin Schuh, director of Chrome engineering, asked the web community for help to increase the privacy of web browsing, something browser makers like Apple and Mozilla have already been doing on their own.

"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, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete," wrote Schuh.

"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."

That's a significant shift for a company that relies heavily on cookie data for its ad business. Google Display Network uses third-party cookies to serve behavior-based ads. And Google partners, like publishers that use Google Ad Manager to sell ads, will also be affected.

Over the past few years, as Apple, Brave, and Mozilla have taken steps to block third-party cookies by default and legislators have passed privacy legislation. Meanwhile, ad tech companies have tried to preserve their ability to track people online. Google has resisted third-party cookie blocking and last year began working on a way to preserve its data gathering while also accommodating certain privacy concerns.

Schuh said Google aims to drop third-party cookie support within two years, but added that Google "[needs] the ecosystem to engage on [its] proposals," a plea that makes it sound like the company's initial salvo of would-be web tech specs has been largely ignored.

In a phone interview with The Register, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist Bennett Cyphers said there doesn't appear to have been much community interest in Google's proposals. "When they announced Privacy Sandbox last fall, they threw a bunch of code on GitHub. Those repos don't show much sign of engagement."

Cyphers said he couldn't speak to discussions at the W3C, but said people haven't shown much interest in Google's specs.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the EFF, said in an email that Google is influential with standards bodies like the W3C but that doesn't mean the company will get what it wants by throwing its weight around.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:47AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:47AM (#944475)

    Native Brave ad in SN comments, how queer.

    Brave is an ads machine, why would you want to use it?

    Also, both Brendan and Mozilla could be wrong at the same time. If Mozilla did weird shit, that doesn't mean Brendan was a saintly genius. Plus, he created JavaScript, that's pretty damning on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @10:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @10:58AM (#944484)

    I have $35 in Brave bucks. Give me more, Daddy Thiel.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @06:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @06:50PM (#944656)

    You have to opt-in to ads on Brave. By default it simply blocks everything and adds a whole slew of single click privacy options like the ability to block third party cookies on a per-site basis.

    So you basically get a super-privacy focused Chrome. And yeah, if you want you can opt-in to ads you also get paid to browse. Personally, you literally could not pay me to see ads - but for some, it's a reasonable compromise.