Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025. Google for the past few years has been trying to reinvent the software …
I've had a gmail/Google account for many years, only used for non-important stuff and remembering my music history/taste on YouTube. A while ago they stopped me logging in unless I gave them a mobile number "to verify it was me". Bollocks. They wanted it as a unique ID to relate me to other web activity. Someone on here said to wait a few days and they'll stop insisting on a phone number and sure enough it started working again. However, Google have now pulled the same stunt again and this time I decided "feck them", so have abandoned my gmail/Google account for good. Track this Google (holds up middle finger).
I dropped gmail because they started shitting on my friends with unusual names, saying "that's not your real name, and we are disabling your account until we get documentation (e.g. birth certificate) that it is"
That was the push I needed to start paying for my email.
Ad industry rivals, not so much concerned about the privacy aspect of the whole affair, worry that Google's reimagined tech stack will put them at a competitive disadvantage by denying them the data they use to make their ads more effective.
Well, yeah. Dropping third party cookies is a privacy improvement, so it's bad for them. Google is the one actor in the whole industry who needs third party cookies the least, which is technically a good thing in this case because otherwise they would not going forward with this. Every time Google pushes for privacy, it's because it fucks everybody equally but they stay ahead.
Whatever the tech mechanisms, it's still monitoring and profiling individuals. Gooooooooooogle still has a view of what you do, so bang goes privacy again. What's really needed is for the con that is user-targeted advertising to be punctured once and for all. Masses of evidence show that it only really works for the brokers as the ostensible 'targeting' is typically crap. This won't change if a digest of the previous week's browsing is used instead of cookies, as what they just did is an inherently lousy basis for assessing what will interest the user next. The efficient approach to ad targeting (insofar as any approach is efficient at all) is page content relevant ad placement which would not require any snooping on users at all. But I suspect that broker profits would fall, as they're primarily boosted by the fact that real time auctioning tends to inflate placement prices.
Oh wait -- I said "misses the point", but it depends on whose position that's judged from. If the point is to maximise broker revenue as it seems to be, the current approach will persist. Albeit in a succession of technical guises, the underlying principle will be retained.
I used to think that, but it turns out that it has bad problems, too. It causes site operators to enshittify their content and spread their focus by adding garbage material that might seem, to a computer, to be relevant to high-value ads, but is actually worthless to any user. In fact it seems to be causing search engines to use the presence of such filler as a metric of "quality", and promote sites with high volumes of ad-relevant garbage over sites that deliver clear, concise, focused information the user actually wants. This is part of the reason that your Google search results suck nowadays.
I'm about ready to say just give up and ban all advertising outright.
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