Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking Google's plan to prevent marketers from tracking Chrome users across different websites by anonymizing IP addresses is being challenged by, surprise surprise, a marketing advocacy group. The Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an organization that has lobbied against Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative by claiming it's harmful to …
Indeed - we have a business that openly steamrollers over the public's privacy (and complains when said public have the absolute bloody gall to stop them by running ad blockers) complaining that another business is preventing them from said spying while they do exactly the same.
You couldn't make this crap up! The whole lot of them need putting up against the wall.
I remember years ago in the mid 80's I was living in the states and at the start of the major football (Gridiron) finals they actually displayed a grey screen on the TV as the advertisers realised that during the initial advertisements people got up and went to the toilet, got food, got beer etc and that no one would watch these expensive adverts.
I remember tivo or it's like introduced technology that filtered out the adverts from recordings but was taken to court as this was "theft" and the sw was banned.
Didn't stop me installing similar software on my tivo.
I miss my tivo 1 even 20 years later, way ahead of its time.
Perhaps a system like 2024 spec vehicles in the EU/UK? Take your eyeballs away from where they are mandated to be (such as when overtaking a bicycle) and set off an alarm. You need this, because they say so.
Look away from adverts/leave the room and automatically crank the TV volume up to 11, so viewers at least have the audio pleasure of adverts whilst in the kitchen making a cuppa. Perhaps the phone in your pocket could mirror the adverts everywhere you go too.
Isn't our controlled future marvelous?
It’s the frustration of watching anything on ITVX, it wants you to watch the adverts so no fast forward of adverts and active confirmation you want the stream to continue playing before each ad…
The stupidity of the app developers, means the Humax PVR isn’t going to be retired anytime soon.
And blow the room up!
A little unsubtle and somewhat destructive. I'd suggest slowly replacing the air in the room with helium. The "why are you speaking in a squeaky voice?" " no, you're speaking in a squeaky voice!" conversation just before they pass out would be the icing on the cake.
This makes me feel dirty. On one hand I fully support Googe here (shudder!). Why should people be tracked across websites and profiles made for marketers to exploit.
On the other there is a part of me that sees this as Google doing Google things to try and keep user.data and tracking to themselves to protect themselves a s chief trackers & profilers. You can guarantee this is not being done for our benefit but Google's.
Is it possible for them both to lose?
This is exactly how I'm looking at it. Google looks like they're protecting users privacy but actually they're closing the door on the independent advertising industry, which they can do when they build the tracking directly into Chrome.
The good old Privacy Sandbox. It isn't private and it isn't secure.
You don't need to worry, advertisers. For you see, people are still being tracked. Google is just making it hard for you to track people, not for them. Google is working quadruple overtime to make sure they can still track people. If you advertisers still want to track people, you will just need to pay Google for it. Their browser does, after all, track browsing history for marketing purposes.
Google is providing the first hop proxy.
I see no reason why other organisations could not also provide the first hop proxy and browsers designed to implement this feature with a configurable first hop proxy.
Add in a configurable list if first hop proxies with a shuffle option.
Like having a list of DNS servers with a shuffle option to prevent any one server from having a complete list of dns requests that your computer is sending.
It may be a technology that Google is developing for its own benefit but at its core is something useful that could be extended into a powerful privacy enhancing tool.
Probably because even the utterly racist Braverman couldn't find a way to blame the (legal) small boats for this one. Therefor it becomes a "think of the children" excuse instead, while carefully ignoring that almost all child abuse happens in the home, or by individuals who are very close to family.
Remember what Rwanda used to be infamous for, before becoming an unexpected destination for asylum seekers.
Yep one bunch of locals committed acts of genocide on another bunch of locals. The racial stereotype they used to identify the other side was height. To Europeans it didn't appear to be racist, but it was.
You list a number of characteristics for Braverman to "prove" she's not racist, but one characteristic stands out by it's absence, and that's the main one she's being accused of racism towards.
I admit I don't like her, but that's political, I'm allowed not to.
It isn't just the UK. The CSAR in the EU would similarly bust privacy in Europe, and they euphemistically named the proposal Child Sex Abuse Regulation so naturally anyone opposing that bill will obviously be against protecting children from sexual abuse. If that gets adopted, you can say goodbye to any online privacy in the EU.
Using a VPN hides your IP address and limits the tracking data to the VPN ISP, but you don't hear complaints about them. Reading Google's plan (and the protocols in RFCs) for the IP Geolocation for each proxy containing 1 million people, doesn't seem to hide you any more than the IP Geolocation given by your ISP POP (point of presence) locations shown when looking up your public IP address. The proxies will be set within a defined block of Google and/or other companies IP addresses just as with ISP's (publicly available info), in a defined geographic area that seems to increase the chances of being isolated. The Geolocation definitions are in XML files that also contain the GPS co-ordinates and radius of the defined proxy area, these XML files can be protected through various means, but with the history of servers being hacked I have little faith in these files remaining secure from hackers and being used against the users. If your ISP, Proxies or VPN are in the U.S or in the five or eight eyes countries (share intel with and from the U.S), count on your activities being logged no matter the marketing nonsense.
Equally foolish is the belief that the anonymizing of the data collected by Google or any other company can or will hide you. Multiple studies have shown that no matter the size of the data set and no matter the methods of trying to hide the users. All were able to be identified, by their activities and various metadata left behind. They use the data for and sell it to marketing, advertising and research so there is a limit to the anonymizing they can do to the data before it is useless to them. This whole online privacy notion is Unicorn hunting, the vain search for a creature that does not exist.
I think this is just written in a way open to confusion - I interpreted it as "Google can see the user's IP, but the websites being visited cannot."
Aside from that, NOBODY should be praising Google for this. It's purely a monopolistic land-grab since Google control the overhwelming majority of both advertising and browser markets. By locking them together they will become the identity gatekeepers and websites will have no option but to pay up for any kind of analytics.
That's fundamentally wrong. Analytics doesn't care about the user's IP which is already pointless because of Carrier Grade NAT. It's only the approximate location that's important and that can't be hidden because of legal implications, because the sites need to be able to know the country of the user.
By separating the user's IP address from the user's destination through Google's service... Google will be the gateway to the internet. Besides tracking every single user interaction on the web it can also filter every freaking user request or redirect to whatever the hell they want.
Sure, sign me up!
"Google's IP Protection means ISPs will no longer have visibility of data via an IP address"
Good. The nosey bastards don't need to know.
If they can't use cookies or IP address to track users, I'm sure they'll think of something else - maybe a browser extension or toolbar (remember the days of toolbar infested internet explorers, with so many bars installed that there was barely room for page content?) Something that phones home for every site you visit.
Of course, you'd have to make it something that the user wanted to install, something so damned handy that they couldn't live without it. And that's going to be hard, because you want it to appeal to just about everyone, yet everyone is different. Still, it's a possibility - anyone got the contact details for these marketing folks...? :)
I do take their point about fraud prevention - that used to be a major problem in the early days of AdSense, and I'm sure it still is. But they must already have ways to deal with that for folks using VPNs, if they haven't they should have, and anyway they've brought this situation on themselves by being far too eager to track all the things, all the time. So, sympathy for marketeers:=0;
"Google's IP Protection means ISPs will no longer have visibility of data via an IP address"Good. The nosey bastards don't need to know.
Actually they do, but most of the time most ISPs don't want to know. It takes a lot of resources to log every session, especially when a visit to an ad or tracking infested website might spawn 50 sessions a user will be blissfully unaware of. Unless they use adblockers, then notice browsing is a lot more responsive. The only time I've ever needed or wanted to look at session data is when I've been trouble shooting problems, otherwise it's really aggregate flows I'm looking for, eg for peering analysis.
However, Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC) was a thing, and the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 is still a thing in the UK. That forced ISPs to retain communications data, for some valid reasons, ie allowing LEAs to investigate serious crimes. As this is currently UK law, and similar legislation exists in other EU states even though the Data Retention Directive was declared invalid, how will Google comply with that legislation?
I'm sure AlphaGoo will use it's billions of lobbying power and wine & dine real 'influencers', but their land grab is going to break a whole bunch of stuff.
Chrome is Google’s browser, Chromes privacy sandbox is Google’s…
From other articles about Google and Chrome, it is clear Google want ALL data from Chrome interactions for itself - remember Chrome’s incognito mode and privacy sandbox don’t stop Google collecting data about you. Given Chromes dominance in the browser market , this would seem to be monopoly behaviour…
Suggestion would be for Google to divest Chrome, but still have to contribute financially to the Chromium open source project.
It seems to me that Google has access to everybody’s email, all of which are exposed to an artificially-intelligent observer., which is owned operated controlled and queried by Google.
“Hey Google, what are the top 5 stocks on Nasdaq that are gonna jump in value today?”
Nice system.
I love the marketing BS
"By monitoring individual IP address activity for each campaign and those IP addresses clicking on keywords 10+ times per day, we have been able to exclude these IP addresses," the purported marketer wrote in early August.
In many a large company, individual IP address visible internally, go "external" , and just the one IP address (or maybe a handful depending on company size) "exposed" for all employees. SO that marketeer with their 10 click logic would thus have a good chance of excluding the proxy IP address of lots of big companies (in cases where big companies allow a bit of personal browsing e.g. on a lunchbreak or for information research purposes ).
.. and I assume marketeers have heard of IP spoofing?
Google still collects all the data on what sites are visited, so the privacy is only one way to keep the site owners from knowing who is visiting. Oh wait, that's not an oversight that's by design - now the marketers will become beholden to Google for data on who is visiting their sites since they won't be able to collect it for anyone enabling this feature in Chrome!
I'm sorry, but I'll block the proxies or their entire CIDR blocks if I have to. I have a right to log the IP addresses that connect to my servers and I have a right to access control.
Use a VPN if you want, but if you're evading bans and spamming, I'll block every fucking network they ride in on.
Of course you have that right, and nothing about Google's response to the marketers would deny your ability to do exactly that. I will end up doing the same. While I don't agree with blocking entire blocks, I do automatically block abusive users, and it won't be long until some abusive bots start to use that proxy system. For the same reason, although I have not explicitly blocked Tor exit nodes, many of them can be found in my temporary blocklist based on someone using them to try something that my server saw as dangerous.
Just STOP using Google, GMail, Google Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android and anything else that they put out.
There are alternatives people. Go cold turkey on Google and starve them of data.
If I have to answer one of those stupid CAPCHA things then I either go to another site or access the site via a VM and a VPN that puts my IPP at Google HQ in CA.
<q>"By monitoring individual IP address activity for each campaign and those IP addresses clicking on keywords 10+ times per day, we have been able to exclude these IP addresses," the purported marketer wrote in early August.</q>
But why are they advertising CSAM material? If they are not doing so, this objection fails.
mandatory client side certificates. If you wanted to access anything on the internet you would need to register and verify your identity in order to be issued with one or more certificates which would permit you to access your isp, google/bing etc, web sites and almost any other resource.
Unlawfully obtaining, possessing, supplying or using such a certificate would be a serious offence and might get you sent Rwanda or someother ghastly place - not that contemporary England isn't a serious contender in the godawful places' league table.
Fortunately I am pretty sure it would a) achieve anything or b) actually work but recent legislative history suggests neither failing would be a serious obstacle.
Here's how many adverts I watch.
Zero... it's zero, it's been zero for years, it will always be zero as long as I have control over what I'm looking at.
Broadcast TV... time shifting. I will pause live TV for 10-15 mins so that I can skip through the adverts, or I simply record and watch later so I can do the same thing.
Online - I've been quite vocal about my use of ad/script/cookie blockers, forcing https everywhere and using a VPN 24/7 even though it means places might become unavailable to me. The BBC block you if you have a VPN now, as do Netflix once more... and by block, I mean... can't even load the site if connected.
Print - LOL... who buys print anymore?
This is the consequence of a toxic advertising industry... I will NEVER stop blocking them, making whatever data they can collect as worthless as possible.
Next up... I'm gonna put together a pihole I think, was toying with the idea of getting one to run home assistant for my solar/battery system to maximise charging cycles at cheap rates. So maybe I can do both on the same raspPi
So, if some intelligence agency wanted to monitor the entire world's internet traffic, they just have to gain access to the two proxy systems?
The question is, does every intelligence agency in the world demand access using legal powers, do the proxy owners sell them a super expensive subscription, or do they hack in?
I guess is depends whether they are on the good list, the maybe list or the naughty list.
Well, the first hop will be Google, so Google sees the client IP. It also sees what you want to connect to before it sends it on to the second proxy.
So Google sees all connection info. I don't see how to prevent the first hop from seeing all info.
The second hop won't see the client IP, so the second hop is indeed in the dark about individual client connections.
BUT: All only works if any data (so not the IP header, but data layer) is properly inspected to prevent IP leakage in the data part.
Oops, this is not possible as all is end-2-end encrypted.
Assuming the two proxy setup works as designed, the big advantage Google has over anyone else is the in-browser data collection in Chrome. If you "turn on sync" as it suggests then it tracks every place you visit to "improve the relevance" of your search results and so you can sync you tabs across devices (a feature of very little value to me). If you're still in the Google-verse because you have to be then it's worth running their privacy checkup. You might find almost all the data they have on you is coming from Chrome because of this setting.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
