More on Google ad personalization / Privacy Sandbox (and Panic)
More questions, more answers ... As I've noted before, I am not an
"ad hater". I don't run ad blockers. Ads ultimately mostly pay the bills
for many sites, and I'm not in the club that feels one deserves to get
everything for free and not even see any ads.
Google's Privacy Sandbox is an interesting technology to increase the
value of ads while preserving key privacy aspects. I doubt, however,
that it will satisfy the ad haters. Nothing will, except no ads at all.
Everything for free is their ultimate goal. Impossible, of course.
But frankly, having those key ad personalization settings default to ON,
at least that's what they did for me, is almost certain to rub
anyone already disposed to dislike ads to dislike them even more.
Yeah, it even bothered me. I know what Google is likely thinking --
most people will just stay with the defaults. But with something like
this, I would have been much happier to have been presented with a set
of three questions requiring me to make an affirmative selection of ON
or OFF for each before proceeding, rather than having ON already set
as the clickthrough default, requiring going to settings to change
them.
This is a crazy time for tech. One senses more than a bit of panic
among even the largest Big Tech firms, and given the toxic political
landscape I can't blame them for that. But we're now at a stage where
policy decisions that might seem attractive in the short run could easily
trigger consumer and political blowback in this environment, and ultimately
be a disaster for these firms, their users, and society at large.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
T2: https://t2.social/laurenweinstein
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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