Privacy Sandbox, Google's answer to third-party cookies, promised within months Google this week said some of its Privacy Sandbox tools will see general availability in Chrome 115 on July 18, in order to prepare for the slow phase-out of third-party cookies next year. "Starting with the July Chrome release, and over the following weeks, we’ll make the Privacy Sandbox relevance and measurement APIs …
Google answer to "privacy" sounds far far worse than third party cookies. Look at some of them:
* Protected Audience for remarketing (showing ads based on past website behavior at other websites) - Deleting cookies are easy and relatively painless. But clearing history ... Often I need my history. Clearing that is not trivial.
* Topics (showing targeted ads without identifying people) - I guarantee that it won't be difficult to identify people.
* Attribution Reporting (measuring ad interaction without third-party cookies) - Why isn't clicking on the ad enough? Nothing and nobody should ever know if my eyes or mouse hovers over or near an ad.
* Shared Storage (sharing data cross sites without sharing identifiers) and Fenced Frames (a related cross-site data mechanism) - Why are two cross-site mechanisms mentioned?
All web ads should be static, non-tracking, and not in-your-face. And no ad should ever have any scripting code so that malvertising can never work. That strategy was quite successful when the internet went from luxury to necessity. If it worked once, it can work again. If Google ever implements this, I am going to loudly tell everyone I know about it and tell them to switch to Firefox or Brave.
That's fine and for users like you there should be the option to log in to google and enable personalization allowing even for the possibility to actively manage the topics you are interested in.
No need to track your behaviour on other web sites to allow that kind of personalization and by no means a reason to allow google to track the rest of us.
If you're looking at a website for nail polishing tips, I think it's reasonable for them to show ads for nail polish. Computer game ads on such a site would be weird.
Likewise if you're looking at mobile phone coverage in Ethiopia, from an IP in France, they could potentially infer that you're planning a trip and advertise flights. But when you stop looking at that topic and go back to a gaming forum, it's wrong to still be getting adverts for flights to Ethiopia.
Basically: Infer interest from context, not from tracking.
End, means, justify!
No, honestly, I actually prefer personalized ads too, but at what price?! Back before I really got hardcore with my tracker blocking, I found and purchased several great things in Facebook ads. (Now it has no idea what to show me and that can be hilarious.)
The problem is that it's not working *for* me but *against*, and there are a million and one reasons that the data necessary for these ads to work well can and will and is being used to manipulate me. This is a Bad Thing[TM].
You may, but, as sites that've dropped personalisation have found, click-throughs go up without it.
Because, shockingly, when you've bought a toilet, you're unlikely to want to buy another for a while, but if all your ads a naval gazing then they're not going to show you something you may be genuinely interested in..
This "echo chamber" of personalisation web giants seem to push for are terrible for business, and for people, I'm sure if many americans weren't in closed groups being reinforced with the same idiocy every day and could see outside their bubble the country would be in a bit of a better place..
"It can't get worse than it already is."
Oh it most certainly can. It's very hard to make things better, and very easy to make things worse, refer to the second law of thermodynamics. Remains to be seen whether Google's approach will make things worse. If they have "a digital marketer and co-founder of marketer advocacy group" on the other side, the changes might not be all bad.
"Well if [you're] actually using a decent browser, 3rd party cookies are a complete non-issue these days."
Apart from crappily designed web applications which use multiple domains for essential functionality (such as being able to login) «cough» Office 365 web apps, and so you have to enable third-party cookies for these sites to work…
Although if browsers do eventually stop supporting third-party cookies then that would result in such badly designed apps needing to be rewritten, which would arguably be no bad thing.
(Begs the question as to why third-party cookies were ever actually allowed to exist in the first place, as 'tracking' (in the broadest sense) by 'other' websites is the only reason they exist: for essential activities such as logging in which should be closely integrated with the main site other means of tracking state should be used, or they should just be on the same domain in the first place.)
you have to enable third-party cookies for these sites to work
that's why I'm using 3 different browsers online, with different privacy settings. The worst offender being Chromium – in its "Ungoogled" variant though – where everything is allowed, but all history and cookies are wiped out at the end of the session ... which I only use to access some mandatory Google Docs using some fake gmail account. Real browsing is done with a real browser in strict settings. Banking is done in its own browser where nothing else is allowed.
I guess that the NSA can still go after me, but I hope I can keep the averag scum away from my computer. Icon, obviously
i hate these people ...you notice how everythig can be construed as some thing else to these cock wombles ..... "red is the new black" etc"
"If grocery outlets closed tje home bake isle forcing you to buy there bread " .... firstly why would they ?
And secondly bread i buy anywhere is not going to follow me as far as it can on the inter butts... aslo it's not going to profile me throigh whom i know and ascociate with and match all my devives and them sell that data to an underclass of bottom feeders
I'll admit to sticking with Chrome just because it's easy and ubiquitous. This though looks like enough to get me looking at alternatives again.
Suggestions welcome.
Beyond that it feels as if there isn't a week goes by when I don't abandon some task because some previously adequate web site becomes inaccessible due to some arcane 2FA invention, or just because they've made some simple task stupidly complex.
The Internet us horribly broken, and I can't see a likely fix appearing.
"makes websites load more slowly – about 50 ms on average"
Not that I shed many tears for advertisers, but that's surely hardly a worry. Yeah, if a page were to take 30 seconds to load, some people might grumble (but we often waited that long in dial-up days, and it didn't really bother us, just take a deep breath, and relax), but I doubt that anyone is going to notice a page taking 50 ms longer to load - it takes longer than that to sneeze! I doubt if anyone really cares much if a page takes 1, 2 or even 5 seconds to load, although they might notice a little towards the upper end of that range, but it's still not exactly the end of the world.
Ah but you’ve missed the clever bit. If I’m reading this correctly, it only takes 50 ms longer to use the suggested third party workarounds, but not if you use Google official ad services. Then because your webpage loads more slowly, even if it’s imperceptible to the user, Google the search company (not the same company we swear) will downrank your page as compared to competitors using the approved Google advertising.
> I doubt if anyone really cares much if a page takes 1, 2 or even 5 seconds to load
Yes I do, if that delay is for no better reason than someone wanting to sell ads.
If I can get the page in 400ms with a privacy hardened browser, or 2 seconds with accepting all that advertising cruft, then it's not a hard choice for me to use the former. Because I value my time, not to mention my privacy, alot higher than some companies ad-revenue.
You wanna serve me ads? Fine: Serve me dumb ads.
You wanna serve targeted ads? Fine: Serve ads that fit the theme of the websites I'm visiting.
You wanna serve me ads that require collecting information about me or my browsing behavior, no matter how that works? Forget it.
Dumb ads were enough to finance basically the entire web, at a time when it had way less users, and I see no reason to help enable anything beyond that, just so some shareholder values can go ever upwards. So I will continue to use privacy hardened browsers, and there are so many people like me, people will continue to develop them. And if that means that some ad companies revenue goes down, or some top executives have to share a private jet or *gasp* fly commercial 1st class, I think I can live with that.
I'd never use Google's Chrome build, so use Brave instead.
I have multiple separate Brave profiles to isolate kinds of activities from each other, including my general browsing profile, this is also handy to reduce bookmark folder clutter on the bookmarks toolbars e.g. a separate profiles for careers stuff, different training providers, etc.
PiHole is running on my LAN on a Raspberry Pi, with dnscrypt-proxy for DNS lookup, with it specified as the DHCP DNS server by my router, and I do check scan the logs for stuff I don't want.
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