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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> Google Analytics

Website analytics should not rely on cross-site tracking. Breaking any cross-site tracking ability of GA is unambiguously good for users.

> Google Ads conversion tracking

Apple already proposed a mechanism of privacy-protecting click attribution. If Google doesn't want to use that, it's because they don't respect your privacy. Again, unambiguously good for users.

> Using same login across different sites like Gmail & YouTube

The only way this is "broken" that I can see is the user has to log in separately to each site. Which seems fine to me. In fact, this is a good thing; just because I log into Gmail with one account doesn't mean that's what I want to use for YouTube.

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I don't disagree with your note on cross-site analytics (though there are some in my mind valid use cases, such as tracking conversions when the payment process occurs on a separate domain), but the tracking policy is fairly vague as to the impact on single-site.

Our goal is not to break single-site analytics, and if it gets affected as an unintended consequence, we will try to come up with alternate solutions.

Noted--thanks for the reply, both here and to my other comment.

Also I thought that the way Google solves the shared login problem is that completing the login process on accounts.google.com redirects you to YouTube briefly (as a top-level navigation), which sets a first-party cookie for itself and sends you back to Google.

From the policy:

Interactions with other parties are considered third-party, even if the user is transiently informed in context (for example, in the form of a redirect). Merely hovering over, muting, pausing, or closing a given piece of content does not constitute an intention to interact.

and

Navigational tracking is tracking through information controlled by the source of a top-level navigation or a subresource load, transferred to the destination.

It sure sounds to me like Apple intends to block YouTube’s trick. Transiently redirecting to a domain to install a first-party cookie seems like an unambiguous attempt to circumvent third-party cookie restrictions.

That click tracking spec is useless for advertising at scale. It only supports up to 64 campaigns is what I remember as the worst offender, somewhere in my comment history is a bit more when I first read the spec.

It offers 6 bits of campaign ID with the intention that campaigns need to be bucketed. Maybe it could be a bit more, but if it was, like, 32 bits, it could be used as a user ID.

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