Google claims it will stop tracking individual users for ads:
As Google's plan to kill third-party tracking cookies ramps up, the company is answering questions about what will replace it. Many people have wondered: if Google kills cookies, won't the company just cook up some other method for individually tracking users?
Today, Google answered that concern in a post on its "Ads & Commerce" blog, pledging it won't come up with "any technology used for tracking individual people." The company wrote:
We continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.
You might look at that statement and think that Google is sacrificing something or turning over a new leaf when it comes to privacy, but really, the fact is Google doesn't need to track individuals for advertisements. Google's cookie-tracking replacement technology, the Chrome "Privacy Sandbox," uses group tracking, which is more in line with how advertisers think anyway.
As Google puts it in its blog post, "advertisers don't need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers." If you're an advertiser with a phone ad, you would only ever want to show your ad to "people who care about phones." As an advertiser, you wouldn't really care about individuals or exact browsing history, as long as you knew they were open to being manipulated by your ad.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Spamalope on Thursday March 04 2021, @11:25AM (1 child)
they'll have a method to de-anonymize the data, or internally it never will be at all.
Or... if you think the biggest stalker in history 'just stopped' you probably trust signed certificates of authenticity for famous person signed memorabilia.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:11PM
(Score: 2, Touché) by shrewdsheep on Thursday March 04 2021, @12:09PM
In other worlds, those gullible enough to believe you on your "new" strategy, can later be manipulated. Put that in your marketing material and you can put all concerns from the advertisers to rest.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday March 04 2021, @12:33PM (2 children)
> Google Claims It Will Stop Tracking
That is not important. Important is when the Congress will claim that Google will stop tracking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:23PM (1 child)
I get what you're trying to say and part of your point is valid. However, I'd hardly call "Congress" the authority on this matter. Those motherfuckers don't even understand how the internet works. Many can't be trusted, if they do understand. If society as a whole has a way to validate and prove the bullshit tracking is curtailed, then I would say that holds more weight than anything someone in congress, in one geographical region, would have to say on the matter.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:35PM
It's a matter of privacy, not technical. Congress is the legislation body which should define American GDPR-equivalent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @01:41PM
So what they are saying is their analytics about everybody has told them that people are aware enough that they need to move the pieces around a little and make some kabuki theater about how they "care" about privacy, in order to obfuscate. Pretty much right out of the firefox playbook. Which should reiterate the question that people need to be asking: Is Firefox actually a 501C3 project, or is it a division of Google?
"We care about user privacy"... "netstat -tnd --continuous says otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:03PM (4 children)
I'm not going to say Google is "good" here. They are probably doing this because it fucking makes sense.
If I look at Amazon and I search for diapers, it probably means that I would like to buy some diapers.
If I search for how to make bread on Google and then I search for African trees on wikipedia, it's not going to help Google to sell me trip to Africa about making bread. The ad would be fucking retarded. The connection is not there. I don't want whatever search history they mine. On the other hand, if I search for African Trip, then it makes sense for them to serve me ads about that, at the time. Or on websites that are related to that topic. Search history is fucking useless to narrow down my purchase predisposition.
Basically, maybe google found out that people want what they want at the time they want and placing ads about what they searched a year ago or a month ago for does not make them more likely to click on the ad today. I know, rocket science. But now they actually found out this and so they want to spin it in a positive way to milk the result. "We will not use search history anymore!" without adding "because it was fucking stupid and futile and didn't result in sales anyway". Yeah, they will just use the "recent search history" to narrow down the context but then throw it out as time makes it irrelevant anyway.
But spin. Must have positive spin.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:14PM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @03:01PM
Well, this is exactly how smart rocket engineers go about it, unless they already know how to build the perfect rocket (in which case the exercise is still not incorrect technically, but somewhat doubtful financially).
The Germans did it with von Braun et.al. and nearly won the battle of Britain, the Soviets did it with Tsiolkovsky et al. and nearly got to the moon, the Americans did it with von Braun (again) et.al. and actually did get to the moon, [keep adding every other space-faring or war-waging group from China down to Hizbollah] ..... and then Congress invented the design-by-committee rocket. Which is NOT rocket science, neither good nor bad, but a political exercise with the goal of spending money in the right places to the right people. That this does indeed employ rocket scientists is more of a collateral then being the point; they would do rather without if they believably could.
You might have been duped into believing that rocketry - or any engineering - advances without failure. This is not true. The BOOM is an essential, non-replaceable part of the process.
To be honest, I am really, really happy that the world seems to be doing actual rocket science again, with things going BOOOM. If only for the fact of showing the previous (and STILL no boomless!) travesty for what it is.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday March 04 2021, @02:55PM (1 child)
That's understandable for consumable products, not so much for a one-time purchase such as a gas range. A lot of people report being hounded by retargeting ads for durable goods even after they have completed a purchase elsewhere.
And when multiple household members share one browsing device and its advertisement profile, retargeting also tends to leak information from one household member to another.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 04 2021, @03:33PM
I can verify that Ebay does this. Amazon to a lesser extent. And, despite the fact that I have ads and tracking blocked dozens of different ways, I still see the occasional email for the product that I researched and purchased last month. Some of the tracking is trickier than others.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 04 2021, @03:29PM (1 child)
Your app fingerprint can identify you
https://comp.misc.narkive.com/HDBf9KI7/your-app-fingerprint-can-identify-you [narkive.com]
Canvas fingerprinting, font fingerprinting, and webgl fingerprinting
https://mybrowseraddon.com/canvas-defender.html [mybrowseraddon.com]
https://mybrowseraddon.com/font-defender.html [mybrowseraddon.com]
https://mybrowseraddon.com/webgl-defender.html [mybrowseraddon.com]
Supercookies haven't gone away just because Flash has.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-are-supercookies-and-why-are-they-dangerous/ [makeuseof.com]
TLS 1.2 and 1.3 supercookies?
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/supercookey-a-supercookie-built-into-tls-1-2-and-1-3/ [privateinternetaccess.com]
Tracking pixels
https://en.ryte.com/wiki/Tracking_Pixel [ryte.com]
Google doesn't need cookies to track you - nor does any other tracking company out there.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @01:33AM
Aye, I fucking hate it. Every website I go to:
"There goes that user that calls everyone a Nigger again"
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 04 2021, @03:44PM (1 child)
"Pledge" hehe. The only pledge I trust Google to stay true to is Lemon Pledge.
But regardless: even if Google was honest, it says nothing of Alphabet and its other subsidiaries. I bet Fitbit won't pledge to stop collecting highly individualized information.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday March 04 2021, @05:13PM
ftfy. :)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday March 04 2021, @05:09PM
That's great, still not putting one of your phones in my pocket. As I mentioned like a decade ago once Google has your data you can't ever know they've disposed of it.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @06:47PM
...as soon as you agree to give us your data voluntarily.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @07:55PM
In other words, Chrome has achieved enough market share that Google can collect the user data they want directly from the browser without having to track it from individual website cookies (like competing browsers). They have successfully become the 800lb gorilla in the room. Google is now in a position to tell advertisers that they have to deal with Google directly and they no longer need a free internet market to do business in. Killing off cookies closes the loop hole for competing sources of data collection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @10:54PM
Much more likely they see the coming political storm and want to get out ahead of it by retiring "one, old, method of tracking" so when the political storm arrives (which, given the nature of political storms, will be up in arms about that "one, old, method of tracking") Google can honestly say: "we don't use that method of which you speak".
Never mind the Wizard of Ozz redirection of "don't look behind the curtain" in that they have simply moved on to the fifth generation "new tracking method", while they wait for the political storm to catch up to the second through fourth generation methods. Which by the time it does, Google will be on to generation 9 and be "safely away from the turmoil" in their minds.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Friday March 05 2021, @12:44AM
...DuckDuckGoogle.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday March 05 2021, @07:13AM
This is bait and switch, smoke and mirrors. I'll pull the relevant info from TFA:
IF they are going to track me anyway, I find the idea interesting that they will assign me into a group instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Currently, no AI can figure out what my real interests are because advertisers think binary. I get lumped into one group or the other. A lot of people on Soylent have that same problem. Example: I don't want to be associated as either a Republican or Democrat. Both parties are insane and I want nothing to do with them. However, I do want to keep up with current news and hear viewpoints from multiple sides including (but definitely not limited to) hardcore Republicans and Democrats.
However, look at the wording. It sounds like Google will put a notch in Chrome every time you (or I) express an interest in Republicans, Democrats, Christianity, Islam, Atheism, Pastafarianism, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Blake's 7, the Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", Bud Light Beer, porn involving seven-toed french maids swinging from chandeliers, ...
Well, if that isn't a unique identifier, I don't know what is. I mean, there are only so many ways to store this information. 1) They will count the number of times you search / visit these kinds of places, 2) an expiration date is set a certain amount of time after the search / visit, or 3) they permanently mark an interest in "Suntory Yamazaki 50 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey" because you wanted to find out more about this extremely expensive whiskey five years ago before realizing you'd never be able to afford it. (Google is too smart to go for option 3, and I don't think Google will miss an opportunity to vacuum up information by letting information simply expire.)
So, there you have it. Google will restrict other companies from getting their information on you, but they will most definitely be able to retrieve that information, compile that information, and sell the aggregated information to advertisers in the form of the API. This means I call bullshit on Google that they won't let "any personally identifying info going up to the cloud" and "Chrome will keep that detailed information locally".
And I still don't see a good way to stop advertisements from popping up at unwanted times. When I'm working or showing family something on the computer, I definitely don't want the french maid and viagra ads to show up.
[Thinking]
More thoughts: How can a website get information about your demographics without personally identifying you? If a website uses an API on a Google server, how will Google know what your interests are unless they are given a unique identifier by the website? Even if the unique identifier is masked (encrypted) so that the website you're on doesn't know who you are, Google will still know it is you. And if the API is directly built into the Chrome browser so that the a website can use it directly (thus bypassing Google vacuuming up all your juicy information), then what's to stop the website from simply taking all the information and personally identifying you?
Yeah. I call bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @07:13PM
I'd be more interested if I can be 100% sure that Google's ad stuff will only serve up static ads. No javascript no fancy shit. Just static images.
Then I might consider unblocking ads for some sites since the risk of being a victim of malvertising (getting pwned through ads) becomes lower.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3044565/advertising-based-cyberattacks-hit-bbc-new-york-times-msn.html [computerworld.com]
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/03/large-angler-malvertising-campaign-hits-top-publishers/ [malwarebytes.com]