this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Not sure how Chrome's alternatives for providing relevant ads are harder to block when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it's collected) in the settings. These systems are what Chrome is able to do at the moment to work towards blocking third party cookies. They do have an incentive to make something that they know works well for them though, I'll give you that.
Is that part of the chromium engine which is open source or is it closed source ? Because if that part of the code is not visible it doesn't matter what Google tells you.
It's part of the open source chromium engine.
Here's how it implements some of the privacy sandbox stuff for example: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox/
and here's some of the Topics API stuff: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/browsing_topics/
Theoretically they could still inject malicious code even if the stuff in the chromium source code looks fine. Given they got sued for their servers still tracking you while Chrome was in Incognito mode (even with the warning every time you open Incognito mode), I'd imagine any injection of code like that would result in another lawsuit (or several). At some point you either have to trust that Google is implementing things how they say they are in the code that they put out or just use a different browser.
I checked your link but as most people I'm not programmer, so we can't check or even remotely understand what Google engineers does. On the other hand, what common people can understand is 'follow the money ́. Google makes most of its money on selling personalized ads, the more data they get on you the higher advertiser will bid.
It would make absolutely no sense, financially, for Google to reduce it's tracking ability and let the user decide which ad they want to see or not.
And at the end Google is a business, money goes in, more money goes out. They could be doing what they claim to do right now, only to change in 2 years when all third party advertiser are bankrupt because they can't use cookies anymore. That's another possibility.
The way I see it, Google knows that changes are coming to the advertising industry, either through regulations or just public opinion. By doing this now, they can try to get ahead of those changes/criticisms while controlling what systems their advertising competitors will have to operate under. I don't doubt that Google will still have enough data to do relevant advertising, either with the data from these new systems in the browser or the first-party data they have on people through their sites.
As a relative layman I also have the same question. If you can turn it off, what makes it so bad?
I’m not saying I trust Google, of course. It just seems like they have a vested interest in screwing over third party advertisers and making them more dependent on Google. If you can then disable the Google part, isn’t it a net benefit?
(I don’t use chrome and am not familiar with this change, so I may be missing something)
Strictly speaking, it's an improvement over the current situation where you are tracked across the web to come up with a profile of your interests which is then used to deliver targeted advertising. The interest-based advertising is the end goal, it's where Google makes its money. Google doesn't necessarily need your data or to track you across the web to do that. I think people are unhappy that it doesn't go far enough and just want either no targeted advertising or no advertising at all. Removing the ability to target ads would result in more ads being needed to make up for lower quality placements, which I believe would lead to increased ad blocker usage and an advertising death spiral. News sites are already almost practically unusable on mobile without blocking ads for example. Having no advertising means getting revenue another way such as paywalls and subscriptions.
With the Topics API, your browser will keep track of your history and provide sites with a limited number of topics (1 per week). Instead of being an opaque system on an ad provider's server, you can examine and modify the topics being used in your browser or even look at the source code of the feature in the browser itself. With the Protected Audience API, the ad bidding process can occur in the browser as well instead of on a remote server. These features can be turned off.
There is definitely some concern that they're screwing over third-party advertisers which is why their pages come with stuff like:
Regardless, Chrome ditching third-party cookies means that websites can no longer rely on them and must adapt their sites to function without them. This will mean that Firefox's Total Cookie Protection should work better and they can remove third-party cookies in the future instead of having to create workarounds.