Google's Privacy Sandbox
I believe the big Achilles heel of Google's Privacy Sandbox, their
continuing effort rolling out in trials already, is Ad Topics, that
replaces third party cookies with an advertising API involving local
device modeling of your browsing history into predefined categories
(about 350), with sites able to receive up to three of them most
highly ranked.
Google asserts that this will maintain or increase the value of
targeted ads while increasing individual user privacy by moving away
from third party cookies and ad hoc techniques used by sites to try
target individual users.
Google is moving to default the various aspect of Privacy Sandbox to
ON, based on the usual hope that users won't bother to change the
defaults.
I think the two words that spell the main trouble for this plan are
"browsing history." Most people are quite sensitive about this and
assume it is private. Even if shared with Google for enhanced
services, they don't really want advertisers to know anything about
it.
Hell, even I feel an emotional punch when I think about advertisers
being handed information about my browsing, no matter how carefully
categorized, anonymized, and sanitized. And I know how this stuff
actually works. I even agree that in theory it's better than the
status quo with third party cookies, etc.
Is this really going to fly in the long run? It seems unlikely as
currently defined. Most people aren't going to understand it, just
like they don't understand that Google doesn't sell user data to
advertisers -- a widely held false belief that Google has never really
been able to dispel. And Privacy Sandbox is even more complicated to
explain to the average nontechnical person.
Politicians from both parties are going to jump all over this. The
fine points of privacy balance will be lost in the noise.
This is unlikely to end well for anyone. -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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