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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:17PM (5 children)
look how well that ended for broadcast radio and TV
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:21PM (2 children)
I do wonder sometimes, if CNN and MSNBC and Fox would be as bad as they are now if they didn't have ads, but had been part of an a la carte cable pricing system instead.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:10PM (1 child)
Somehow restricting MSNBC, FOX, or CNN's audience to only viewers who selected them and paid for each would seem to enhance the rhetoric filled echo-chamber effects.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:23PM
If they started doing so now absolutely would, because they've already burned every ounce of credibility those institutions have and appealing more strongly to shrinking audiences is all they have left.
But if they started that way, I'm not so sure. "We need to attract demographic X so run story Y" doesn't make any sense as a strategy without advertisers and their infinite checkboxes. It would probably bias them towards the interests of upper middle class people who think it's a positive image of themselves to watch news enough to pay money for it. But it would also quash the need to say "We must have more viewers in this time slot, get someone who makes everyone really angry"
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:20PM (1 child)
It worked pretty damn well when there were no alternatives like streaming or piracy, if you wanted to watch TV you had to bend over and take the ads or get up and do something else (in my case I was a kid and with only 1 family TV, so we muted the TV and bullshitted until the show came back on) -- and since there were no cell phones back then, there was none of that either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:40PM
So...your whole family is stupid? That explains a lot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:18PM
Oxymoronic in the highest degree.
Advertisers, by their nature, do not want what you want, they want to change what you want. They want to do it by consuming as many moments of your ever shortening remaining moments on earth as possible. That's not healthy.
As bad as I am about remembering to support this site(I'll get to it starting this year, once my current big expenses are settled, I swear!), I'm much happier with it being user supported than "healthily" supported by ads.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:25PM
"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"
Um, no, because those goals are diametrically opposed. As long as ads are targeted, privacy cannot be preserved.
But really, the concept of an "ad supported web" is the problem. A few companies have now made the experiment, and discovered that blasting ads onto the Internet does not actually buy them anything. FWIW, I can anecdotally support this: I used to run an AdWords account for a small company. We tried various strategies for 2-3 years. The only inquiries we got, were inquiries that we didn't want. It was useless, a complete waste of money.
Personally, I believe the only people who think ads on the Internet work are people whose jobs depend on them working. Stop internet advertising, fire all the marketing types who buy the ads, sell the ads, produce the ads. No one would notice a difference, except for the marketeers standing in the soup line. Oh, and companies like Google, who would have to find some other way to fund themselves.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:43PM (4 children)
Thankfully, we now have Duckduckgo and Mozilla is still putting up a fight.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @05:48AM (3 children)
Which Mozilla is this? The set your default search engine to Google Mozilla, or the forcibly install unwanted Mr. Robot 'addon' Mozilla? Mozilla only gets credit because they're labeled as a not for profit. So not for profit that they manage to operate on merely half a billion dollars a year. How Brave! Every since they fired Brendan Eich, Mozilla has been headed downhill hard both from a technical point of view and from an ideological one. Probably not coincidentally, Brave is everything people like to idealize Firefox as being. Go figure, hiring and firing on identity politics doesn't result in good product outcomes.
I completely agree on DDG, but I think when a good company starts going down hill we should be much more vigilant, vocal, and active about it. Google is why. I think a part of the reason Google grew so incredibly rapidly is because they gathered a tremendous amount of good will in their early 'don't be evil days.' Even as Google went full Voldemort, people refused to believe it and came up with a million different excuses on their part. Some still do to this day. Companies change, and Mozilla is now one of those companies. If one really wants to avoid Chromium based browsers (as Brave is) then I think Pale Moon would at least make more sense. Mozilla caring at all about anything besides their bottom line is becoming increasingly laughable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:47AM (2 children)
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
I have $35 in Brave bucks. Give me more, Daddy Thiel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @06:50PM
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by rigrig on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:55PM (1 child)
More and more people are not properly being tracked, now that some browsers have started blocking 3rd party cookies by default, so now is the time to develop new tracking methods.
And once Google has their new way of tracking eyeballs, Chrome will block tracking cookies as well (in the name of privacy), giving them a huge advantage over their digital stalking competitors. Especially as this great privacy update will also disable a whole bunch of other fingerprinting techniques (but not the one Google uses), so even if other companies invest in developing their own non-cookie tracking system, those might still suddenly stop working.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:01PM
Perhaps google already has alternative tracking methods, so this is just a method to hamstring their competition.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:14PM (4 children)
Since its in the headline, but not the summary, here's the paragraph about user-agents from the fine article:
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:12PM (3 children)
At the risk of asking a stupid question: why do we need a user-agent string at all? Browsers should implement web standards. Websites should not need to program for specific browsers. The user-agent string enables this nuttiness. And if your website is pushing the envelope so hard that it is running into browser bugs, then you need to stop pushing.
It is possible to spoof the user-agent string. Mine is currently sent to be empty, and the web works just fine. I have a lot more problem blocking scripts - it's amazing how many sites have no fallback. User agent? Not important for most sites. I'm sure they can still fingerprint me, but there's no reason to make it easy.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:41PM
We don't. The standard does not mandate that. I hacked my browser to return (null) when queried through all mechanisms, and mostly nothing happens. Sometimes I get "Your browser is no longer supported" dialog boxes. Sometimes I get stack traces from a null pointer exception when the losers tried to process the user agent. Sometimes I get "Fuck off you filthy hacker" pages (especially via Cloudflare).
(Score: 3, Informative) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:24PM
To poison the collected dataset.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:50PM
The original HTTP 1.0 specification gives the User-Agent header as one of the optional headers. The reasons given for it, "This is for statistical purposes, the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations." Other than the tracking allowed by it, the browser war made the header useless, as every browser is trying to pretend that it is a different browser for older servers that don't exist anymore.