Enter Sandbox: Google is building an internet without cookies
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This feature is available right now in Analytics and Ads. It's called "Google Signals." The documentation is publicly available, although it's a little scattered between different product page. I'll summarize:
If the user is using Chrome, and is logged into their Google Account, then you can use that instead of cookies. This is used for pulling in demographic information, cross-domain tracking, and cross-device tracking (something even 3rd-party cookies can't do without fingerprinting!).
The Privacy Sandbox kills other channels that might be an identity signal. Meaning ones available to parties other than Google.
Even as an anti-Google zealot who disapproves of this, I'll admit there are some ancillary benefits. For one, I honestly do believe that Google intends to kill fingerprinting, because it's in their interest to do so. For another, Google does offer a setting "disable personalized advertising" which will centrally let you opt-out of this tracking.
But most people are surprised when they find out that things already work this way, which to me already puts it on ethically dubious foundations from a privacy perspective. And, of course, the monopoly issue.
> “disable personalized advertising”
On this bit, tracking concerns are not just for advertising though. Extending your reading on how they replace cookies with the Google id, I’d see them replacing ad targeting with other uses of the data anything that wouldn’t straight be labelled as “ad” (scoring, black listing, indirect target matching, etc.)
There are a few settings for this kind of thing. You can take a look at https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization
The "Ad personalization" bit is probably what the parent comment is referring to. But it sounds like you're interested in the "Web & App Activity" bit, which will turn off the non-ads usage of your data. To a certain extent at least, since there are some grey areas.
For example, I'm on the team that sends Google Shopping emails. If you click a button to track the price of a specific TV, we'll still send you an email if that price drops even if you've opted out of "Web & App Activity". But if you've just been browsing shopping pages for TVs, we won't send you a general email about TV deals if you've opted out. Both of those cases are in some literal sense "web activity" but it's still pretty clear what the user expects.
But you might imagine- if you're tracking the price of a specific TV and opted-out of Web & App Activity, should we send you an email if a near-identical TV drops in price? We probably wouldn't, and we don't have anything like this today, but it's not quite as clear. And Google has so many features across different teams, I can imagine there's probably at least one where some privacy reviewer made a different call than what you would have made.
The price of a TV (or almost any common product) is driven more by large scale factors (cost, competition, features and brand) than the latest 4 dollar shift because of some promotion in some channel somewhere.
We are optimising for the wrong things. Computers are supposed to be our agent in the digital realm, reaching out for us, in our best interests.
If we turn off all storage of personalised information completely and utterly, 95% of everything I ask can be answered from context (please show me cheap TVs).
Look, i don't object to the idea behind the sandbox (it's always been weird that browsers tell the server what fonts and other settings exist. I mean who ever optimised for that)
What bothers me is that it's a google id. Just let me have a few U2F ids - this is my shopping id, track it if you may. when I take it out of the slot stop tracking me.
I am sure I am feeling extra grumpy today, but when we stop tracking and trying to find ways to make me buy, and start finding ways to make my life better, that's when we have a digital revolution.
I also think that marketing/advertising is bad since it distorts value perception but i remain pragmatic and we can't ban all advertising that easily.
If we are ever going to manage the flood of data out there we need digital agents acting on our behalf. The AI behind the facebook feed or the google ad tech is a very early beta of those agents - and "on our behalf" may seem a stretch. But that's not just a cheap snide remark - I think on our behalf is a fundamental issue of how they will be built and designed and regulated.
Richard Thaler has promoted Paternalistic Libertarianism - which seems to me a very good default setting for digital agents working on out behalf. It's not however that simple.
I hope we shall see a Medical approach to managing data - where everything is shaped by the best interests of the data subject. But there are three major world views - let's call them European, US and Chinese for over simplified ease.
The Us view is caveat emptor - one should be rugged individualist enough to be able to calculate the best co-pay arrangement and by extension work out ones preferred facebook privacy settings. If you get it wrong you will be prey for the payday loan industry.
The European view that by default it should be good for the individual (although as a Brit I should sneak in that the state gets to define good. And I suspect the Chinese view is it should be good for the confucian society - and the state may have some say in who is in and out of that.
As we are entering the new era of regulation of tech, these conflicting world views are becoming entangled - and we coders will be on that front line.
Choose a side - and be prepared for some very weird outcomes.
I would be happy to voluntarily provide a list of topics I would like to get ads for if I knew that this helps get rid of the cookie and tracking mess we have right now.
Think of a questionnaire a la Netflix that you spend 3 minutes answering to so that it gets your preferences.
The current system we have in place is not just creepy, but also crappy. I see it on YouTube, both the ads and the video suggestions are very poor.
What if someone is identified by a model as being in market for a TV and then opts out? Would they still be classified as in market at that point?
I work in digital media, feel free to get technical with your response.
The answer to both questions is no. If you opt out, your data is not used for modeling or targeting or anything. Perhaps some internal reporting that isn't used for anything other than like PMs wanting to understand user behavior? Even that I'm not sure about.
If you are identified as being in market for something based on activity and then opt out, you will no longer be classified as being in market. That classification will be deleted- though perhaps not immediately but within some reasonable time frame, say 24 hours or so.
As long as this is connected to a Google account, well, then that's one thing. One doesn't need to agree to those terms.
Google is continuously trying to transcend this. Look at AMP, which is an attempt to run the entire internet through Google for tracking purposes. The strategy is always the same: Promise some sort of consumer benefit under the condition that everything will be tracked. Yes, one can opt out of targeted advertising, but Google still owns the data and uses it internally.
This new play is the exact same thing. As is all other efforts to track people, logged in or not.
Your choice is this:
Have an account and have everything you do tracked by Google (or the next company), give them all your data to use in their algos, and agree to terms that state that they can do whatever they want with the data. Perhaps then you can disable targeted advertising, although that also doesn't really work, does it?
Or, second choice, do not have a Google account. However, then you are subject to subversive attempts to track everything you do and use the data whether you want it or not, illegal or not.
This goes against some basic tenets of law in many countries. My data is my property, not yours. Google is powerful enough to not care, but make no mistake: People working for Google and making these decisions should be in jail. Any malice and hate targeted toward them is 100% justified.
I'm not sure who gets the worst deal from tracking, the companies buying ads or us having to see them.
That said, I have heard a few times comments mentioning that it's easy to filter out (from the ad provider side.) I hope not, but if it is, I would only hope someone smarter than I would send a PR. :)
I guess I just don't care who makes money off fingerprinting as long as I can choose that no one makes money off me personally.
I'd rather be on a well-regulated network that has the resources to have proper security in place rather than on fifty tiny ones who scrape very detail of my life and serve me crappy ads, this is basically how porn-sites work.
It's not useless, nor is it realistic to imply they are all unable to secure "your data" through their narrow lens. Treating "your data" as monolithic, necessarily implies attribution through centralization - all exchanges between multiple parties are at least a 2 way transaction of identity. It's the consequence of decentralization that there are gaps, not a fatal weakness.
Providing a “baseline” user agent instead of a detailed specific version could help for example.
How is the Google Account ID shared if not by cookies?
Set-X-Totally-Not-An-HTTP-Cookie: sessionToken=bigiain; Expires=Wed, 17 Jan 2091 10:18:14 GMT
What does it do if the user isn't signed in to Google?
Google's engineers would have to have an unbelievable level of contempt for users to propose a feature that claims to improve privacy by signing in to Google.
I, for one, find that level of contempt totally believable.
Well, then they just use you to train their fire-hydrant, bus, bicycle, and stair image recognition algorithms.
Look, I’m not a google fan but you can’t just ignore half of what google is doing. Even then, you’re missing that they are other ID projects that are closing ground on googles ID.
To make things worse, couple of years ago, Chrome started mingling Chrome Sync and cookies for accounts.google.com which meant that signing into Chrome Sync also automatically signed you into all of Google services. The cookies reappear even if you delete them, just because you are signed into Chrome Sync. Now, that same identity (<you>@gmail.com) is not just used for Google's own websites, but also made available to anyone who uses Google Analytics - which is 90% of the web - including your cross-domain and cross-device history. Of course, none of this is new, but I shudder every time at the thought of how much information the user is giving away about themselves.
Are you conflating the aggregate anonymized data in GA with the user level visibility Google has into the raw data?
Isn't that kind of the point? I see no difference. Who cares what individual site owners happen to be able to see if Google is going to monitor, track, send back (telemeter?) way more data and be able to analyze and store it forever?
It's all about who might possibly get the data at a later date than who happens to house it presently.
EDIT: In fact, come to think of it, why are there two things being 'conflated' here? Why is Google collecting more information about Google Analytics-using sites than it's exposing to site owners?
It does not directly contain PII. Google can join it to PII, website owners cannot.
It is not aggregate. You can pull the hit-level data from GA, including the identifiers being used.
That sure doesn't sound insidious...kind of like a large Internet ad company trying to make sure that they're the only one who can track your activity online.
Don't worry, though. If you were using any of the now-dead competing advertiser networks, you can target using this information for a small fee! They sure know how to benevolently push forward the wheel of progress to fight to ensure your absolute privacy from everyone but them.
Not that I'm a fan of these 'Signals'--or even cookies for that matter.
But only because they have a far more efficient way of tracking users _and_ make sure they're the only one who can benefit from this.
It's unbelievable how absurdly anti-competitive and anti-consumer google has become, yet nobody seems to care.
Sounds like they are finally realizing their vision for making Chrome in the first place -- to sell more ads.
I'll stick with Firefox with temporary tabs -- I already an protected from third party cookies because Firefox already isolates every tab, but importantly doesn't send my browsing data anywhere.
The goal: to show you only ads for things you care about and are likely to buy and be influenced by advertising for, is good. But the reality is a mess.
Some of the downsides of Google's proposal are obvious, given its position, but there's at least one downside that users might notice: lots more ads targeted only by the demographic of the publication, making the web look more like print media or TV and presenting you and me with a lot more space on our screens wasted showing ads for things you don't care about.
As for the "fingerprinting" proposals? Bad. Very Bad. Think digital "facial" recognition bad.
No, that's bad. The last thing I want is to be influenced by adverts.
And I'd rather not make ads less effective because that would mean either more ads or fewer publishers.
It's easier to ignore ads that are totally irrelevant.
The ads that are targeted are the most distracting.
I'd rather see ads about some detergent than about a new SSD drive that will catch my attention and makes me forget what I was looking for in the first place. When I need a new SSD, I will just visit a shop. I don't need ads for that.
Sure I can ignore ads for feminine supplies (as a male they are obviously useless to me), but I'd prefer if I didn't have to.
Wouldn't it be better that you see an ad for a no kill mouse trap that you didn't even know was a thing? Ads can sometimes inform people about products that they didn't even think existed.
And if there was a better mouse trap, then any salesman would quickly learn about it (e.g. at business conferences etc), so you could just go to a shop and ask.
Finally, if you really insist that targeted ads are superior to anything else, then you could just opt-in to a service that provides ads. And you could tell the service all your private details so it knows how to better serve you (without the service having to guess at it).
Just don't assume that someone else needs targeted ads to have a fulfilling life.
Granted somewhere in the last 20 years we have mostly stopped innovating and started optimizing and so now you get ads for branded Skinner boxes (sorry, free to play mobile games) rather than, say, cancer cures but if there were innovating products worth buying, you wouldn't search for them because you wouldn't even be able to imagine them.
Sure I am, if I care about shoes being breathable and waterproof. Why would I not do that, and instead hope a magic box will read my mind and guess what I need?
The fact that there exists normal-looking waterproof shoes isn't something that they know about or would search about
If we don't let that happen, this might be the result:
> And I'd rather not make ads less effective because that would mean either more ads or fewer publishers.
I'd rather make ads so ineffective that they go away entirely. Some publishers will find a way to adapt.
Money changes hands at the time the advertiser agrees to buy the space on the publisher, based on the CPM of the offer. A publisher that can more reliably link ad impression with sales can charge a higher CPM, but nobody in their right mind would buy and sell ads based only on conversion.
Please. Individual targeted ads are worse than content-based ads.
I think they are just intending to target lobbyists/politicians.
Honestly it feels like there haven't been any decent innovations in a long time. Aside from Apple producing an ARM laptop that doesn't suck I can't really think about what the last product I was excited for was.
It does ... weird things to the ad targeting; I'm currently seeing ads for crystal figures that cost six figures. They're pretty, but not that pretty.
It's fascinating to me that people buy ads pointing to things that essentially no one can afford. I guess the idea is that they'll attract attention and people will click around the site to find cheaper things?
It's easy really, you just put ads on sites visited by your target market. That's how advertising was always done before Gattica style snooping was involved.
Individually targeted advertising needs to be illegal. It's bad for society.
There have been a couple of natural experiments showing #2 where entire digital ad spends were slashed at once with little to no impact.
As for #1, look at where a massive chunk of Google's revenue comes from: companies trying to squat their own name and similar keywords to prevent some competitor's product from showing up next to their own.
Any platforms that create content already have well targeted ads without tracking. e.g. HBO
Even on content aggregators, that target niche audiences like HN have well targeted ads without tracking. Jobs and of course Ycombinator listed everywhere.
Killing tracking kills the mega content aggregator industry (front page of Reddit, maybe Facebook feed, etc) but this is likely a good thing.
...this is bad? Sounds great to me.
> ...showing ads for things you don't care about.
This is what targeted advertising already accomplishes: showing me ads for things (or equivalents of things) I already own. Either that or things so wildly off base I have to wonder if the targeting works at all.
Targeting only by the demographic of the publication is not so great because publishers usually only have a vague idea who their actual demographic is. Take for example the TV show Golden Girls. It was supposedly all about the 50+ demographic, but it was a huge with with queer people of all ages right from the start.
I usually see such ads them immediately after purchasing the item in question. It's almost as if the targeting models are, in an abstract sense, extremely over-fitted.
> Targeting only by the demographic of the publication is not so great because publishers usually only have a vague idea who their actual demographic is.
As far as I'm concerned, coarse granularity targeting is a feature, not a bug. I often discover legitimately interesting things I didn't know existed but are adjacent to my interests in venue-scoped advertisements.
Even if I didn't find targeted advertising morally objectionable (I do) I would still consider it functionally inferior to more coarse-grained venue/demographic/etc-based placement.
Targeted advertising doesn't help me discover new things, it tries to preempt purchases I'm already likely to make, and put them in front of me. I don't think that's actually very useful.
As opposed to the ads for toilet seats from that one time I bought a toilet seat online 6 months ago.
If anything forcing adds to be dumb will mean that we get high quality publications in niches again. If you sell model ships advertising on model-ships-magazine.com actually incentivizes a quality site that is interested in furthering the hobby and keeps your dumb smart ads from clogging up the rest of my life.
I am however more likely to click on ads selling me home renovation stuff because they know I've recently bought something in Home Depot. Even though I'm not currently on a home renovation website.
Second most effective are platform-specicic hypertargeted ads, such as Facebook ads. Lot of misses there too, but their first party targeting is good to the point of actually giving me some interesting content.
In practice the third party "contextual" ads mostly are misses for me. Wow, another ad for the home improvement thing I either researched and bought last month, or that I was looking up on a whim and don't have any intention of actually purchasing.
Personalized ads are the opposite - you're browsing a fashion site, but you'll get car commercials because you've been visiting car commercials lately.
Easily avoidable in such case. You just need to do two things:
1. Serve them from your own domain where the URL pattern isn't obvious (so not something like example.com/ads/ad1).
2. Randomise HTML elements (div names, classes, a random amount of empty divs in between).
Voila, ad-blocks are useless now.
That can be countered by adaptive element-matching algorithms.
Just like with cracking software, it's a cat-and-mouse game, and there are far more mice out there... mice who are willing to work completely for free just to fight back against you.
Seriously, the completely f'd up view of advertisers ("Ads won't work unless I can basically track everything about you!!") shows how bonkers the world has become. If your job can't exist without in-depth tracking of how a shown ad influences purchasing behavior, maybe your job shouldn't exist.
Seriously, ads would work plenty well enough by just showing the same ads to all users based on the contents of the page (or search query). Honestly, I'd be all for a legal framework that completely outlaws any "personalization" on the internet unless a user clearly and optionally opts in.
Medicine works well enough with leeches, why would improve that.
There is a path to achieving similar adtech outcomes that are privacy focused, and that is what google is trying to accomplish. Why hate something that is trying to achieve what you want?
How about this: Every user, when setting up a new device, gets a clearly displayed option as to whether or not they want to be shown personalized ads based on the tracking of their browser history. Basically, a clearly displayed "Yes, I want to be tracked for the purposes of showing me ads" option. How many people do you think with want to opt in if they really had the choice? Heck, why do you think Facebook is going so bananas over Apple just asking people to opt-in to tracking?
The only 'innovation' going on is making the tracking difficult for your average, non-technical person to (a) know what is going on and (b) how to opt-out.
That is the scariest thing about this. Google already has an effective monopoly on information discovery via its search engine, and is rapidly approaching one with what software people use to view information on the Internet. It controls the "web standards" and can change them rapidly with little opposition. Websites that have no business being anything but browser-agnostic, yet are usable only in the latest version of its ever-churning browser (or its not-too-different clones), are already uncomfortably common. For a lot of people, Google is "the Internet".
I don't know what the solution is. But there's definitely a problem.
Oh my. That sounds awful.
You know, I think I actually do want Google to build this into Chrome, wire it up to your Google account for nefarious purposes and/or have the whole thing turn into an example that K-anonymity doesn't work well in practice, and try to ram it down everyone's throats. Perhaps that will finally drive people away, and start up some monopoly investigations with teeth.
In the meantime, I'll keep blocking 3rd party cookies, and rejecting on-site ones when undesired.
Secondly is trust. The third party has no way to verify the first party isn't sending bogus requests to increase their payments from the third party and/or hurt their competitors.
Otherwise there's no way to target the ads, it's a first-party cookie but scoped to a single domain so there's no useful targeting data.
(and yes, this is the industry plan, but it's TBD whether publishers like media websites can get a workable fraction of their users to log themselves in)
Not working, because all the other members of the w3c group wrote an open letter saying google is abusing their power/etc.
Personally I find this highly unlikely. The very nature of fingerprinting makes it difficult to prevent without some pretty severe compromises, and it wouldn't surprise me if advertisers enter an arms race with Google instead of caving in.
Of course the economic strategy for Google to avoid that is to reduce the price/limits of this service to so low that this isn't worth doing, but if the effort Google puts into preventing fingerprinting is insufficent then this would lead to a "worst of both worlds" situation - Google gets to pseudonymously track the internet with their "privacy sandbox", and nefarious trackers/advertisers can combine that with fingerprinting to create an even more reliable picture of who's who on the Internet.
FYI, this[0] appears to be the explainer of what Privacy Sandbox actually is, and it's quite vague, presumably because the actual implementation details of this would be difficult to determine.
However it works, I don't trust it if it's coming from Google. I'll keep my multiple layers of ad blockers enabled.
Even if you could shrink that state down to something reasonably small, it still introduces the problem of the client and server getting the state out of sync.
But it becomes much worse with mobile devices, such as a phone. I don't want to lose the state of my browser tabs every time I get into an elevator.
I guess it very much depends on your usage - I wonder the proportion of users who add to a shopping cart and go back to it without creating an account.
Of course, we're also ignoring session local storage, in memory storage etc... for alternate solutions.
Local storage is another story and probably a good alternative to storing something server-side, at the cost of more back-and-forths to validate data isn't outdated.
> I'm not certain whether it's unreasonable or it's become an expected norm; you don't expect to be able to leaving a shopping cart full if you're leaving a physical shop, for example.
It has become the norm, which is why it's (IMO) unreasonable to change that. Realistically, for a solution to be doable it needs to allow for saving the cart state, as otherwise websites will simply resist the change.
Let me gently refer you to the classic paper from 1994, "A Note on Distributed Computing".
Stealing tokens via XSS is way harder to solve.
If Apple can have everything built around a single ID and be praised for it's ecosystem, I don't see a reason why Google shouldn't try, especially since there are people who like Google more than Apple.
Has more details for a lot of the proposals.
Also, try avoiding Chrome. At least use Chromium, preferably something else.
2. Web browsing is not "the internet". I get that headlines are all about grabbing attention by basically stating overblown lies and then backtracking in the details, but come on now.
3. Cookies aren't going away. They are necessary for how a majority of websites with login/sessions work.
4. 3rd party cookies are crap, and they may well be limited by most popular browsers. That is fine and doesn't affect normal web users. It affects advertisers to some degree, but no more than adblockers do.
5. So long as Google is involved in it, they are going to try to keep advertising profitable for themselves. So whatever "it's good for everyone" nonsense they are peddling its just them trying to prevent the public from shutting down the crappy internet advertising that most of us internet users have hated since it began.
6. It doesn't sound like they are working to prevent fingerprinting. That is the direction things should go imo; we need to get rid of all ability to identify visitors period. There is no reason why anyone needs to know what websites I visit or why, and I think there are plenty of people who agree with my desire in that regard.
7. I'm on the side of those calling to abandon Google and their nonsense. They can't be trusted any more.
This is why it worries me so much that so many people use Chrome (and the number seems to keep rising).
May be the most important thing google have done in decades.
Granted. Ive not read the article, so this could be a steaming pile of ... but I'm hopeful.
I'll get your gold card ready.
Best wishes,
Before you say "use firefox", ask yourself why Google donates money to Mozilla.
The other aspect of advertising company is spy company. This will give Google better ways to track users across the web. I'm sure there will be no side effects and the information will be used only for good.
Google is being blatantly anticompetitive, and significantly abusing monopoly status to further monopolies elsewhere. And the govt won't come to help in any near future, so it's up to the rest of us to back them off.
(Now, why firefox? Well, its not because FF allows better tracking, but instead that nobody gets the tracking benefit. It's not a 'screw users with FF', but 'screw Goog with no metrics'.)
I see companies siding with Google because they'll need to, to survive or grow, in the short run anyway.
"Because data are ultimately transferred to the same businesses, it can be used to create detailed profiles, said academics. If information from a dating app, for example, were shared with the same parent company as data from a banking app, it could be possible to deduce the sexuality of a bank’s customers." https://ig.ft.com/mobile-app-data-trackers/