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What's going on with major changes to privacy on Chrome?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Dumb business law bullshit that shouldn't matter but does.
Dropping third-party cookies entirely would be a security and privacy boon for users, and the Chrome folks have wanted to do it for a while. But they can't drop third-party cookies without giving some kind of replacement to the "adtech industry" people. (Not their own ad people — rather, Facebook and the folks who put up the nasty teeth ads.)
Why? Because antitrust law. If Google undermines "adtech" — even though literally no users want "adtech" — then the "adtech" people (possibly including Facebook) will sue them and win. Because in American law, a big business isn't supposed to directly undermine another big business like that.
Sensible folks should just turn off the ad-targeting setting and third-party cookies.
To be clear, yes, I'm saying that this move by Google is not evil. It doesn't take away any privacy that users weren't already losing to third-party cookies from Facebook and other "adtech industry" folks. Rather, it makes it possible to limit how much of your privacy the "adtech" folks get to mess with.
And you and I can already turn it off, and turn third-party cookies off.
And yes, I do think "adtech" is basically a bunch of spammers who (in the words of Douglas Adams) will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes; and that Google is at least slightly better than that.
And yes, antitrust law is, in general, a good thing. This is a weird corner case that, if it had been better anticipated, could have been avoided. It sure would be nice if Chrome were completely separate from the Google business that makes money from ads. Chrome is actually pretty damn good at a lot of things; including (back in the day) getting lots of Windows users to ditch Internet Explorer when it was actively being used by criminals to take over their computers and do crime.
It’s difficult to trust them when they’re also the largest adtech business
No third party cookies is a good thing. It’s very unclear whether this new tracking technology should exist at all
Anyone who tells you all ads systems are a little bit evil is telling the truth.
Anyone who tells you all ads systems are equally evil is trying to sell you pop-ups, spyware, email spam, and worse.
The "adtech marketplace" is a pit of festering corruption that goes way, way beyond anything that you can do with Google ads. There are shitholes out there still trying to figure out how to show you pop-ups just like back in Y2K before pop-up blocking — by compromising your browser security to do it.
I'd suggest anyone who's interested in what ads systems are actually like, go sign up as an advertiser on Google and then on Facebook for comparison. See what you can do. See what they actually do want to sell you. Don't spend a dollar; don't buy a single ad; just see what the product being sold to advertisers actually is. You might be surprised, one way or another.
Like they say, "do your own research". But not by watching videos that agree with you. If you want to see what these companies really sell to advertisers, go try pretending to be an advertiser. They'll let you do that.
Anyone who tells you "all ads are equally evil" are rarely selling anything other than a FOSS software they are a part of, but not anything that could be considered adware. Now granted the are shills out there that your should be aware of. Thankfully there are groups that care about your privacy, like Mozilla in my opinion, that give a shit, but not every group is driven by profits.
It's a fair point, but do check Mozilla financial statements for where they get their revenue.
Hardly a secret you need financial statements for. That google pay mozilla for beeing default search engine. And this is why you all also should donate to mozilla!
On the topic of firefox. I realy like the cookie jars https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-cookie-protection-by-default-to-all-users-worldwide/
Apple has entered the chat.
(See: Their walled gardens, e.g., any browser that wants to bring their own engine to iOS.)
Apple never let them in to begin with. If Chrome turned off third-party cookies for all users today, Facebook (among others) would sue and probably win.
Which feels like one of those things that's technically legal, but against the spirit of the original law