Let me guess, everything about "Privacy Sandbox" is meaningless when the company that proposes it also holds a major stronghold on the web thanks to Google Analytics, Google SSO, etc. Google themselves will likely barely be impacted (and why should we expect otherwise, google is not going to shoot themselves in the foot)
> When faced with a tradeoff, we will typically prioritize user benefits over preserving current website practices. We believe that that is the role of a web browser, also known as the user agent.
Except without advertising half of the internet collapses. And to anyone suggesting that a paid model will just surface, I don't really want to live in a world where only the rich have access to tools as useful as Maps, Translate or Youtube.
"Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present."
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
Wouldn't this data be tainted by the fact that those deleting your cookies are the sort of people who actively adblock or protect their privacy, and hence are naturally unlikely to click on ads?
If the default for everyone was to not target users, the actual revenue value would probably be a wash, because ad targeting is useless.
Or perhaps without cookies, only lower value ads bid? There are a lot of factors and it's not clear how they interact or if they'd be relevant if cookies didn't exist for any user.
Perhaps, but many are using other privacy protection methods. Like I use Privacy Badger, which aims to largely leave ads but kill tracking cookies. I don't ever click ads though, so people like me are who fill out much of the "no cookie" market.
If everyone didn't have user tracking, the metrics on the effectiveness of stalking everyone would be very different.
Google AdSense started off as contextual. Maybe the drop is so significant in this study because Google's ad network no longer knows how to be contextual and is crappy without tracking.
The half of the internet that would collapse without ads is the half people aren’t willing to pay for, and that is expensive to keep up. So, what would be left would look more like a library, and a bunch of paid publications and services.
> Except without advertising half of the internet collapses.
This is a lie adtech industry tries to spread, but it was never true. Among a top couple of million of websites almost none are funded through adtech, as it doesn't pay much to websites at all. Adtech first and foremost is about making money for advertising companies, on all websites it can convince to join in aggregate, and for a couple of big platforms, but definitely not about supporting websites.
There are a lot of good aguments that the bad brought by the internet out weighs the good.
I also don't think all the nice tools you described would go away. People would still provide these services for free, although it would be different people than today.
Why would you have to be rich? If something can be supported by ads, it can be supported by a less than a penny from each user. You don't have to be rich to afford a penny.
And I stated this in a separate child content, but the internet has proven repeatedly that services can be provided ad-free. No ads anywhere. They're either supported by donations, a subset of users who pay for advanced features, or run by volunteers on their own dime.
Listing three Google properties supposedly without competitors (which they do) does not prove that it's impossible (in fact, the hundreds and thousands of other web properties actually prove that ad-unsupported services can and do thrive).
I am not rich but I would pay a monthly subscription for a Google-like service that isnt as crippled or now politically inclined as Google is.
A service that gives me the same results as any other customer. If I want my results to be bubbled may it be by tags I choose such as "Programmer" bubble or "Medical Professional" and maybe even Public Libraries and schools could pay for access to such engines. If I remember correctly many schools pay for curated search engines as it is.
I would also pay money for a solid social network and / or IM service. If I dont see certain people on it even better. My favorite thing about the internet is meeting new people anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I would also love to have the option between a free and a paid model, but that's beside the point, which is that there will always be some people who can't afford the paid one, and for them, access to these tools far outweighs whatever privacy implication there is.
Furthermore, we all enjoy our accurate and free traffic predictions every day, but you do realize that it wouldn't be possible without user data, right?
Google’s annual revenue is $136b (5/6th is from ads) and there are ~2.5 billion active android users. So, google would still be wildly profitable if they charged each user $3.7 a month, and eliminated their ads division.
This ignores revenue from iOS users, and the cost savings from shutting down their ads and tracking businesses.
No it is not, Google is just proposing extra protections around existing mechanisms. That will continue to likely allow google nearly unlimited access to data.
That's not how I read it. To me, it just sounded like trying to standardize all the different approaches everyone is using, so we don't end up with a mess like the User-Agent field currently is, because everyone tries their own hack on top of hack on top of hack trying to play a cat and mouse game.
Trying to standardize is already what Mozilla and Apple (by openly stating their proposal was based on Mozilla) attempting to do.
The only thing Google is doing by proposing this is to attempt to remove or lower the impact on them.
Considering this in the beginning:
>Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.
> They proposed an option for allowing ads without them being a privacy nightmare.
Non-personalized ads won't be lucrative enough to fund the web. Let's stop this equivocation. When people say that preventing tracking will kill advertising, they mean that it'll kill personalized advertising. When you respond to these concerns by pointing out that non-personalized advertising would still be possible, you're using this one word, "advertising", to refer to a different concept. Word games make for bad arguments.
How is showing advertisements for your product not advertising? TV advertisements don't monitor every show I watch and channel I surf to, but they are still called advertisements.
You don't need to sniff my metaphorical underwear to serve me advertisements, and the definition of advertisement surely doesn't depend upon harvesting user data.
> How is showing advertisements for your product not advertising?
Quoting my own post, which you either didn't read or didn't understand: when people say that preventing tracking will kill advertising, they mean that it'll kill personalized advertising.
> You don't need to sniff my metaphorical underwear to serve me advertisement
Without personalization, ads aren't profitable enough to fund free-to-use web services.
> definition of advertisement
Nobody is talking about the definition of advertisement.
And how do you suggest a service such as Maps or Youtube stay free? Do you realize the amount of money that goes into maintaining those services? Would you be okay to returning to using paper maps? Or do you propose the rich get richer by having better tools and the poor are stuck with primitive tools?
How has openstreetmap.org remained free, if it's impossible to do without ads? Or torrents? Or GitHub? Or webarchive? Or any of the millions of other dual-licensed services or volunteer run services?
It will still get done, even without ads. The internet has, oddly enough, been the one to prove that to be the rule, not the exception.
I haven't tried it yet, but Peertube looks like an interesting alternative to Youtube. Mastadon and Matrix are similar exciting projects too. I host a Matrix instance that I and my extended family use to keep in touch, and we can seamlessly interoperate with anyone on any other Matrix instance. A few kinks to work out still (I wish the server software was way less bloated) but overall I think it's a really promising approach.
Google doesn't use webkit any more if that's what you're referring to.
But absolutely Google doesn't believe that. Even if the Chromium team truly believed in privacy (and their track record suggests otherwise), there still is a huge conflict of interest and daddy Google is not gonna let them interfere with their revenue.
That I know, but it is important the differences of a company funded by ads and the ones that are not.
Especially given this right at the top:
> Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.
If the EC or DoJ forced a spin-off of Chrome from Google it would fix that incentive right away. Chrome would be in a position to extract a large TAC payment to be the default search engine (like Apple) and they could realistically focus on being the best browser for privacy.
Makes me think of this quote from the webkit policy https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/ :
> When faced with a tradeoff, we will typically prioritize user benefits over preserving current website practices. We believe that that is the role of a web browser, also known as the user agent.
Google clearly does not believe that.