Privacy proves elusive in Google's Privacy Sandbox Google's effort to build a "Privacy Sandbox" – a set of technologies for delivering personalized ads online without the tracking problems presented by cookie-based advertising – continues to struggle with its promise of privacy. The Privacy Sandbox consists of a set of web technology proposals with bird-themed names intended …
Not so, it is a lot easier for Google to track you even if all the traditional tracking like cookies are blocked since they own the biggest clients (Android and Chrome) and some of the biggest destinations (Google Search, Gmail, Play Store, anything hosted on Google Cloud)
That's why Google needs to be broken up, and at minimum be forced to divest Android and Chrome. Owning both the client and server ends of so much traffic is a privacy disaster.
The search engine should also be split from AdSense. It creates a conflict of interest.
The same goes for Google Cloud. Basically the whole "Alphabet" should be split into independent companies.
Google search business model should change to selling access to the search database (which funnily enough they built largely without asking the website owners they crawled for consent - contrary to the popular opinion, not every website wants to be in Google search).
AdSense then could use that access bought on the open market to build a search engine with their ads, but so anyone else could do it. That creates competition and removes perverse incentives Google currently has.
Plus Google, Amazon and other companies tax affairs should be thoroughly scrutinised. They say they are compliant, but so said people caught in things like Loan Charge scandal. I hope that HMRC will start looking into classic tax avoidance schemes like fake IP costs and look 20 years back for any tax that should be paid.
"Google search business model should change to selling access to the search database (which funnily enough they built largely without asking the website owners they crawled for consent - contrary to the popular opinion, not every website wants to be in Google search)."
That's what ROBOTS.TXT is for.
a set of technologies for delivering personalized ads online without the tracking problems presented by cookie-based advertising – continues to struggle with its promise of privacy.
They want to sidestep the regulation and use Orwellian language to justify it.
War is peace
Personalised ads don't violate your privacy
and so on...
Can we ban any sort of advertising that is based on targeting at point of delivery?
If you have a business selling car parts, you should advertise it on a car forum, not use Facebook or other platform to stalk people and manipulate them into buying your services.
Oh right, Facebook and Google pretty much killed independent web.
Note to regulators: Breaking up the online ad trusts (primarily Google and Facebook) would be a much more effective (and widely supported) way to support news and other information businesses than breaking the internet with stupid link taxes.
Once Mercedes have to go back to paying for advertising "space" in high end magazines and relevant motoring or motorsport forums, instead of paying Google to get access to people who already own an Audi, are over 45, have at least one speeding conviction and wear square-rimmed glasses, the more likely these media are to survive.
"Much of this ad-related data processing is intended to occur within the browsers of internet users"
Great, more bloat. Some of the laptops I work on struggle with browsing now, what's it going to be like when my computer needs to run their crappy code just so they can offer me stuff I don't want?
You are basically paying to run ads, plus this is using an energy that is mostly wasted and create pollution.
The online advertising should be regulated in that regard. For example displaying an ad shouldn't exceed certain energy budget or processor cycles.
If I run my laptop without adblocker, it becomes pretty much unusable after a while, as the ads steal most of the processing power.
Why regulators don't look at it? It's an easy win for the environment and consumers.
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