Google ready to kick the cookie habit by Q3 2024, for real this time Google's delayed disposal of third-party cookies – data stored in web browsers for advertising and analytics, among other things – will kick off the third quarter of 2024. The ad biz intends to press ahead with its Topics API for interest-based advertising, despite being told by the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) of the …
it really pisses me off that advertisers can use my internet connection to send me the equivalent of junk mail. They should be paying me. How is this even legal? They are leeching off my pipe. I wouldn't care so much if the few adverts I see were even distant cousins to my interests.
Fucking parasites.
The process is quite simple.
You direct your computer to connect to a server and ask it to perform a process and send you a result, which it does.
That result contains instructions which can direct your computer to repeat the process recursively, which you permit it to do.
Don't do that, or don't complain that it happens when you do.
Or simply put, as it was above, use an ad blocker (and don't visit cancerous websites).
PRO: It should prevent 3rd party advertisers from tracking the websites you visit and stop them inferring your interest from those visits. Instead the browser specifies topics to be used to filter ads.
CON: It does not prevent 1st party tracking and gives the browser supplier and owners of large diverse internet properties (cough - Google / Chrome - cough) more control and power over advertising revenue. Might eventually be used as justification for banning ad blockers.
Unclear (to me at least) if users get to control the list of topics or if browsers are allowed to infer them.
It isn't the same because all the personalization happens on your own device. Your browser infers that you're interested in buying cars and tells the site, so the site serves car ads. The sites no longer need to set tracking cookies and no ad providers know where you have been before. It also has some anonymisation and configuration tricks so that you can control topics it disable the personalization, and so that you don't always send the same interests.
My (limited) understanding is that the reason I see cookie popups is not because they are cookies, but because tracking my interests requires my explicit agreement. If so, isn't this Google API required to get my permission (which I will refuse) in exactly the same way as cookies do?
Or is there something special about cookies, which Google believe this new API gets around?
Of course, in the UK, I am sure there is some corruption which will mean the government decides to "simplify" the rules making this new API legal. But in non-corrupt countries will this achieve anything for them?
Yep. And a reminder to anyone who isn't a member that NOYB is happy to accept members from outside the EU, if you want to support them. Although they don't take on any actual non-EU cases, their wins are often useful to those of us outside the EU to show what needs to be done.
"some corruption " In Westminster? Shirley Knott!
" Officials at the government’s spending watchdog are examining the controversial decision to provide £220,000 of taxpayers’ money to fund Boris Johnson’s legal defence for the inquiry into his Partygate denials. Meanwhile, No 10 refused to say whether Rishi Sunak knew of complaints about Dominic Raab’s alleged bullying before appointing him to the cabinet."
Out of curiousity, does this mean Android/Chrome will stop allowing Google cookies, or they will stop using cookies for all internet traffic?
What will happen to all the spammy click happy/cookie companies that try and save their spammy cookies on my browser? Will that all come to a crashing halt?
Google's new proposal sounds like a way to track people that will be harder to block. Clearing cookies is, at worse, a minor inconvenience. Clearing browsing history can make finding a website you visited harder to find again. This can be a major inconvenience. Yet, that is one of Google's proposals, to track you based on your browsing history. You just know it will turned on by default, with the off switch buried deep in the bowels of the settings where few people ever look.
The internet went from luxury to necessity before all this creepy tracking. If those ads worked once, they can work again.
Looks like the whole sandbox privacy thing is based around a series of JavaScript APIs that can be called by embedded scripts inserted by the Ad slingers. Noscript should be a pretty simple way of disabling that, backed up by Adblock just in case something slips through.
Google's already anticipated your next move. It's probably one of the main driving forces behind Manifest V3. Remember, that's the change to plugins that will lobotomize ad blockers and in all likelihood keep plugins like NoScript from working at all.
If this goes through, your only hope will be to find and use a web browser that hasn't been contaminated by this drivel, or tempted by the lure of ad dollars and Google kickbacks.
So basically this 'privacy sandbox' will just create a local Google ad agency on my device - not only mining my data to determine my interests and broadcasting interests to advertisers, but also conducting the ad auctions on my own freaking device.
Not content with chewing up bandwidth for all these years, now Google want to chew up gobs of my CPU and power to essentially run their ad business on my device?
P*** off.
And there in lies the rub. They make the ad business and the browser. (near) Monopoly power.
What better way to corporatise the profits and socialise the costs than to make the users PC do all the leg work. And Googlebet get the revenue.
(Do i hear black helicopters in the distance?)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
