Blocking third party cookies seems like overall a good thing for security. Security is good right?
Edit: 2 years is a long time to wait for a security improvement that is literally flipping a switch.
If Chrome blocked third party cookies today we'd see something between these two outcomes:
a) Publishers lose about half their revenue because ads aren't personalized anymore: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-pa...
b) Advertisers figure out how to keep personalizing ads through fingerprinting (non-cookie tracking)
Since (b) is worse than the status quo (users can't reset their fingerprint) I think "a security improvement that is literally flipping a switch" doesn't fit.
Chrome's approach (as described in https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...) is:
* Block fingerprinting
* Figure out how to let advertisers personalize in privacy preserving ways (https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... primarily FLoC and TURTLE-DOV)
* Then remove cookies
I'm skeptical about the approach, since I think blocking fingerprinting and server-side correlation of requests is very difficult, but I think the people working on this are very good and have thought a lot more about it than I have.
This is a great reason to not use Chrome.
Do you think the browsers should block all ads by default?
(i am a user; i don't presume to know what is best for others; speaking as a user that talks to others like me; i don't need to speak about 'users' as a third party entity; i am a significant sample of the set)
At best the ad revenue is taking money away from other web business models by instituting that kind of mentality that drives people away from donations and paid accounts.
Please, consider a paid account/membership when you read the guardian, the intercept, or look for the donation page of quality content articles in wikipedia or any of the loads of blogs written by authors with patreon accounts.
Estimate how many websites you visit each month; people would need dozens of monthly subscriptions if such a system was set up.
Instead, they will rather go to and pay google news, facebook press or apple information to get all their news content. Where would money be taken away then? Content publishers.
For example, I want to disable WebRTC as it can be used to collect my IP address, or disable WebGPU APIs or anything that can be used to finger print me.
JS has far, far, far too much broad access to information that might seem mundane but can be used to profile a user.
Android is the same - you can get the entire list of installed packages on the system and various other pieces of information to build a unique, persistable tracking ID.
There's also a lack of accountability: What information is being sent to what servers? I want a detailed JSON formatted breakdown of EVERY single piece of data that is being sent from my device.
I should be able to block anything that is outside my own determined comfort zone.
But most OS' just make requests to US IP's without much thought now - just turn on Windows 10 in a VM and watch as it sends so many requests with no insight into the data, which many companies (including Google) don't tell you about.
Ask me about a recent GDPR request to Google which I just got a generic response about (and they didn't action my request to delete information, so now I need to complain to the regulator because it was also late).
So yes, blocking ALL tracking by default is sensible.
Browsers, after all, are user-agents designed to serve the user and not corporate interests. Technology as a whole should be there to make our lives easier, not waste our time.
Publishers will not go out of business don't worry. Clickbait will die off because the cheap nasty ads that currently make it viable will disappear. Tasteful, pleasant ads tailored to the current content, negotiated directly between the publisher and the advertiser will remain, and will be harder to block because they are just content served just like the rest of the content on the page instead from a nasty ad network domain.
Resounding yes. Such a thing would be the single greatest security improvement a browser could implement. It would also completely destroy pretty much the only vector online scammers have to reach you.
Most forms of advertising are totally fine. Hell I’m even favor of targeted advertising so long as it’s targeted to the content demographics instead the literal individual following them around.
> I’m even favor of targeted advertising so long as it’s targeted to the content demographics instead the literal individual following them around
Then you might like FLoC (https://github.com/jkarlin/floc) and TURTLE-DOV (https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove). These are both ways of implementing targeted advertising without letting the advertiser or ad network follow you around.
Types of ads that I don't like but I won't be up in arms about from a security perspective.
* Paying for sponsored reviews.
* Affiliate links and partnerships.
* Paying promoters and influences to push your product.
* "One way broadcasts" like billboards, commercials, magazines.
* In house ads like Kroger sending you coupons based on your purchase history at Kroger.
* Corporate press events like E3.
* Paying to post on the community billboard.
* Paying have a booth at professional/enthusiast conferences/trade shows.
* Stuff like E3/NintendoDirect/PAX/BlizzCon.
* Selling air time on radio, podcasts, online videos.
* Sponsored articles/announcements on blogs/news sites.
* Native advertising a la Buzzfeed where they would get paid to write a listical "top 10 things you should order off the secret menu at Taco Bell."
* Generic direct mailings and coupon books.
* Paying employees to suggest and guide customers through the sale provided they're upfront about it. I've seen Lululemon do it somewhat tastefully on Reddit when people post topics looking for recommendations.
But ads that come from ad networks/exchanges are nothing like these while simultaneously being the bulk of what ad blockers actually block.
So I don't see it as a contradiction. The kinds of ads that ad blockers block aren't usually these and are instead are the spyware/malware kind.
Granted desktop fingerprinting is more of a challenge due to differing OS's, screens, GPUs for WebGL, etc. But it doesn't seem impossible.
They have also blocked third party cookies for so many years. The world did not catch on fire.
They use an advertising ID the user can reset.
It was critical to election tampering in 2016, it's been used for racism, sexism, and every imaginable sort of scam.
The only way personalized advertising would be remotely ethical is if it were explicitly opt-in. I notice that's not a thing on your list of steps Google is planning on doing. No surprise.
Unfortunately back when I thought of this I wasn't aware of browser fingerprinting or all the other nefarious things the advertising industry is doing. Fingerprinting turns both FLoC and my idea into tracking vectors, so that's out of the question. The authors acknowledge this problem in the readme.
Turtledove is a longer spec and I haven't had the time to read it thoroughly, but while the idea is good, I see some potential problems - first off, this still involves executing JS to do the "ad auction" on the browser which could have security implications (they explicitly mention that JS should be prevented from talking to the outside, leaks would be vulnerabilities in this case, and I don't trust the ad industry to be nice and not attempt to exploit them); there's also the issue that I just don't want my device to expend processing power and expose me to potential security vulnerabilities for ads; I want ads to be served as static images from the website without the whole bidding thing. From an advertiser's perspective, I'm not sure how fetching the potential ads in advance and moving the auction on the client device would work - my understanding is that auctions are in real-time. I'm also not sure whether exposing all the ads to the public (even the ones that ultimately don't get chosen at the auction) and the auction details would reveal information that advertisers consider sensitive.
Finally, if you look at my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680559 you'll see that I have other problems with online and targeted ads besides the privacy and security aspect.
Unlike print and TV ads, there little-to-none human review, no accountability (Google isn't liable if they serve me a scam ad if I fall for it), and targeting allows to target scams to only the people most likely to fall for them while hiding these ads from the savvy people who would recognise the scam and report it. At the core, this isn't a tech problem but a law problem, but short of a law it can be solved by tech if we heavily block the current model of ads (targeted and served from a central ad network) so it becomes unprofitable and publishers & advertisers have no choice but to host static ads on their own domain, thus becoming liable if they host malware or something illegal (this would hopefully encourage human review).
Specifically, I referenced two proposals for privacy-preserving ad personalization, FLoC (https://github.com/jkarlin/floc) and TURTLE-DOV (https://github.com/michaelkleber/turtledove), and their response was that privacy wasn't the issue, the effects of personalization are harmful in themselves.
For privacy I do agree that you can't just do it with legislation and you also need technology. But if you think the issue is personalization itself, regardless of how privately it is implemented, then legislation is the critical playing field. Blocking personalization on the open web through technical means while allowing it in walled gardens means you (a) still have most of the claimed harms of personalization but also (b) massively disadvantage the open web.
Reading through those links on FLoC and TURTLE-DOV, those are interesting concepts. My worry is that even though the ad selection is done in the browser, it will still leak significant information. For image/video ads, it would require bloating the amount of bandwidth used to serve the ads, or would leak information about which ad was selected by the client.
The two are more or less intertwined. "Personalization" leaks information about people. It has also allowed advertisers to promote material targeting (or eliminating) otherwise protected groups.
People have been outed for being pregnant and for being gay, by outside observers noticing what promotions they were getting.
I am on the demand side, and the thesis and testing methodology seems extremely flawed.
If you disable third party cookies on a test group of certain publishers our (demand side) bidders will start optimizing towards the control group; this is very obvious.
Also, was this analysis conducted on other ad exchanges? For example, Google ADX makes only ~30% of the global traffic we get, and the traffic has very different characteristics from the traffic we get from APPNEXUS, Rubicon, etc.
I believe this is an analysis for Google's internal conclusions, and not for the industry in general. Has this been made public before?
It says "turned off the availability of personalized data for a small fraction of randomly selected users" and "The experiment was applied to a small fraction of each publisher’s traffic because we did not want to materially affect publisher revenue, though in aggregate the amount of traffic evaluated as part of the experiment was significant". It sounds like you're responding to a version of the experiment that was run on a per-publisher basis?
> was this analysis conducted on other ad exchanges?
It says the experiment was conducted "through the programmatic arm of Google Ad Manager’s serving system". I'm not sure what this means, but I don't think it includes AppNexus or Rubicon.
I believe any publisher could run their own version of this experiment by picking a slice of traffic and telling all their bidders to only show non-personalized ads.
> Has this been made public before?
This document was released in August: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency...
This means the cookies for the auctions of a control group of users were not exposed. The experiment is still wrong, the bidders will still react in real time discarding the traffic without identifiers; specially since it comes from ADX where the identifier is the key to evaluating the model.
Not taking any other ad exchange into account is a huge flaw if you want to extrapolate the conclusions into conclusions for the whole industry. Other exchanges provide different identifying properties such as the 4th octet of the ip_address with each auction. Google ADX doesn't send this bit of information, they obfuscate the ip_address always. It's obvious that if you remove cookies from ADX, there is no reason to use ADX since the cookie is the proxy for your model on that exchange, but on the other ad exchanges you could survive just fine.
There is no way I read this experiment in which it makes sense as a conclusion for the whole ad industry.
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...
They find publishers only have a 4% premium on programatic ads that involve behavioral targeting.