Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users From today there will be a great disturbance in Chrome – as if millions of browser cookies suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. On Thursday, Google is expected to begin publicly testing a version of its web browser that by default cuts out third-party cookies – bits of data deposited in the browsers of …
MajorDoubt gets an upvote from me for that comment, although while Google is making money from peoples privacy via Chrome, I think that there are even worse apps and situations. Compare what you browse for, to the junk emails that you receive, to help get you some clues.
Using a browser to visit a website is two independent risks.
Sometimes you don't have a choice. It might be the only browser your workplace allows, maybe there's some specific site you need to go to that only works with Chrome (yes, sadly, we're back to that shit again) or some other similar sort of situation.
"It might be the only browser your workplace allows, maybe there's some specific site you need to go to that only works with Chrome (yes, sadly, we're back to that shit again) or some other similar sort of situation."
If your workplace only allows Chrome, don't do anything personal on a work machine.
I have yet to come across a web site that only works with Chrome, but if I did, that company wouldn't have any chance of getting my business/view/etc. I do often find sites that don't work with TOR or behave very badly when using it. That's tells me a bunch about the site. Except for fairly benign searches, I do the vast majority of searching using TOR and DDG. Just to stay in the realm of slightly paranoid, I very much do not want a public search history or one that can be subpoenaed.
Which bit of this grand plan addresses the “I don’t want anything to do with your ad network and I definitely don’t want your ads stored on my laptop and I don’t want to waste my processor cycles on serving me a load of crap I don’t want” issue?
As an aside, if a website brings in (say) some crap from googly analytics and THAT sets a cookie, is that considered a 3rd party cookie? Or (as the web page specifically linked to googlies) is it a 1st (2nd?) party cookie?
And his assessment of Protected Audience, formerly known as FLEDGE, is that "it is possible to use this system in ways compliant with EU data protection law."
Yes, by turning it off?
You can twist it all you want. Just because "auction" runs on client device, not only means client's resources are being misused, but also you can still extract private information by setting bids high enough for given interests and then checking who "won".
Do they really think people are that stupid?
"Do they really think people are that stupid?"
Yes, they do. And unfortunately, most of them probably are. Although "ignorant" is probably a better word – when I explain this sort of thing to people, they're usually horrified and ask me how I can make it go away. I just tell them to use Firefox.
"People...keep buying overpriced crap cause it's Apple (insert favourite maga-corp here),"
I use an iPhone. Not because it's Apple, but because it isn't Google. What's your excuse for using Android - the extra privacy?
"watch Disney movies...."
Sturgeon's Law applies with all movies. Disney has good movies and bad movies.
This is all very charming, but am I alone in finding that Google, Facebook, and the rest consistently deliver ads for things that I don't want and have never considered?
Whether it's search results or advertising, my experience is that in recent years the web giants have really lost the plot.
"This is all very charming, but am I alone in finding that Google, Facebook, and the rest consistently deliver ads for things that I don't want and have never considered?"
I switched most of my searching to DDG on TOR since I am hugely random and actually do look things up I hear on the news to clean up what gets called "journalism" these days. You just never know when a TLA is going to target you after a search. Subsequent to the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI was suspicious of anybody searching for a pressure cooker. I expect some people looked them up due to not knowing what they were and others were actually looking to buy one and got stuck in the 'terrorist' pile until proven innocent.
So now I will have to pay for:
1)A phone with more storage to fit MY stuff on because it’s all used by ads.
2)A phone fast enough to display adds after all the bs JS completes.
3)A mobile service fast enough so I don’t notice all the auction abuse happening and slow my page loads.
4)A data plan with enough data so they can download and store all their adds on my phone without limiting what I want to do.
Google can’t even realise I’m a balding man with no pets when it comes to YouTube adds (I’m looking at you hair products (inc electrical), Tampax and pet food supplies).
No wonder the telecom companies want Big Tech to contribute to their network when it’s full of crap like this being slung around that no-one wants.
At least with the mail system, the delivery company gets paid for delivering their spam.
I want to know when i can start invoicing for my time, my resources and my private data being slung between them all.
I'm sure you can purge the advertising cache files every time Chrome creates them, but that will just cause Chrome to recreate them every time. With a 10 MB limit, it's likely those will be hideously compressed on disk to fit as much as they can in there, so expect to be downloading 10 MB per advertiser when it restarts. The good news: it will probably be different advertisers each time.
This is a good enough reason not to use Chrome if you can't disable this, and I already had a good enough reason not to use it.
It probably won't be as simple as rm Chrome/Profile/advertiser_files/*, but I expect it won't be intentionally obfuscated as you appear to suggest. They just don't need to do that. If someone was motivated to do that, they could do all sorts of things, for example just creating a basic profile containing their settings and, every time Chrome closes, delete the old one and substitute in the premade one. Google hasn't prevented that or even made it at all more difficult. They don't collect data by making it impossible to avoid, but by making it difficult to avoid and counting on people not bothering to do anything too complicated. The things they have gone after have been the ones that are easy for lots of users to do, for example installing an ad blocker, which can be managed by a nontechnical user who is willing to push a few buttons, and even that isn't particularly common among the general public. The reason it doesn't happen is that those of us who are willing to take more invasive measures are less likely to be running Chrome anyway, using either Firefox or a Chromium-derived alternative with some of this stuff stripped out, though not as much as would be ideal.
Is there any actual evidence to show that all this information gathering -- for the sake of argument we'll assume that it's gathered purely for the reasons claimed by marketers -- and targeting of ads has any actual improvement over the old method of simply blasting out your message to a bunch of people? Like, for example, if I run sell luggage, is there actual evidence to show that using Facebook's tools to target ads towards people who have engaged with an airline or looked up prices for flights is more effective than say just putting a general advert in say a travel magazine, or on some site where people can compare and book flights?
There's quite a lot of evidence that it's actively harmful.
Advertising products toilets and dishwashers to someone who has just purchased one is an obvious waste of advertising budget, and "creepy" advertising create a bad association in consumer minds.
However, Sinclair's observation applies:
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
Targeted advertising will only satisfy privacy concerns when you chose your own boxes to be put into via an active mechanism.
If you chose no boxes, then you get whatever random ads are thrown up.
Advertisers need to agree a gold standard of categorisation for adverts so that tools can be developed by any and all companies as required.
And to encourage people to categorise themselves (or accept infered categorisation), then offer cashback rewards in the same way as "loyalty" cards do.
Their linked doc (which requires accepting cookies without opt out, duh) seems to suggest that <fencedframe> limits some data transfer between embedder and embeddee. These new fangled 3rd party cookies (dubbed interest groups) are still fine to share, though?
Reading this comic – erh, comment – you are now graciously subscribed to the interest groups on porn, pedophiles, guns, bomb-making and drugs. Depending on which of these are illegal where you live, law enforcement will be watching which IP address queries which such groups. So much easier than before!
Is there a way to continuously unsubscribe all groups? I'd always overwrite with one, say axolotls, which will give me a steady stream of cute ads. Or stinky socks, for which we are sorry to say, no ads are on offer. Luckily I don't need to, as I'm writing on one of the last seventy three surviving installations of Firefox.
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