How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should
eff.org
eff.org
Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.
Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student.
If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".
If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
> Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows
What does that have to do with privacy or advertising?
> invades your privacy
I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for?
What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction.
Hence the EFFs warning.
But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features.
> "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government."
But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance.
> The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
But you can disable it.
> What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas?
That would suck, but:
a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous
b) That would be insane
I agree that I prefer, privacy wise, to only deal with one company. But, this leaves them in a considerable advantage. It's ultimately, bad for consumers. And, from the beginning, bad for other businesses and market.
It's not like it goes to Google first and then it goes to advertisers. Chrome is what decides which data leaves the browser. Or have I misunderstood?
I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
> I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
I'm saying someone has to pay for it.
Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow
Providers didn't offer free space, you paid for it with your subscription, and you would lose if you changed provider.
Yeah it had ads but without much targeting
Providers: you still pay for internet subscriptions; you used to get several services included for a fair price
As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.
> I easily set up a web server
I can't believe you can write one after the other.
It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine
Other than the hurdles that the giants have put in the way it could be incredibly fast today.
All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.
It arguably failed because of Yahoo, and it was just one hosting service, not a model
Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.
I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career.
> and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle
How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon".
> Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services
All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising.
> Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity
So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.
You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.
So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.
They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them.
If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get?
Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?
They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform.
And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.
And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.
And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.
Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.
I went as far as uninstalling chrome ~1 year ago on my daily driver personal desktop.
I use firefox as much as possible at work, but it is "not supported" by our IT department.
Confluence doesn't even work properly with firefox, its insane. Try pasting a photo you copied into your clipboard (by selecting the file) into confluence and it wont work.
Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
yeah, so lets make that happen and then find out what the response is.
right now we're stuck in the "tried nothing and all out of ideas" state.
People won't switch when you get a degraded experience of Google services on Firefox.
Similarly, if Firefox was as easy to embed as Chrome we'd probably see a lot more alternatives based on it.
People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to use to harvest data; unlike today where chrome is the tool that the data-collectors use to harvest people
Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise.
May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.
HN doesn't need much in the way of a browser, for example. Ditto for a lot of other forums out there. The sooner we get rid of the notion that the only browsers we're supposed to use are Firefox or something else by Big Tech, and the sooner developers stop drinking the Goog-Aid of "progress", the more true browser diversity will occur.
If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.
People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.
Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.
3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.
I’ve settled on using Brave.
Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.
> "Thank you for loving Firefox".
> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.
I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.
Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol
Or, Microsoft will be happy with this "next-level evil."
My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.
My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"
I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.
I get everyone hates on Safari but it is legitimately also a different engine and they have shown to be privacy conscious.
Orion in particular is very good IMO
As for my view, I think thats a bit extreme, though until relatively recently, Safari was slow to update and support many standards that came out in the last 4-5 years, though I think this is largely resolved, Apple does have some security and privacy concerns with APIs like the proposed File System Access API[7] that some feel is overblown and still holding the web back as a platform, specifically around gaining access to native functionality, particularly with iOS.
Also until very recently, their PWA support for things like push notifications were non-existant, they have slow rolled any web platform gains being supported on iOS and that could be perceived as protecting their App Store as the web platform becomes more app like.
My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but this is the overall scope of the complaints summarized
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming...
[1]: https://blog.logrocket.com/when-will-safari-finally-get-it-t...
[2]: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
[3]: Even here on hacker news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377890
[4]: Dev advocate for Safari Team addressing the statement headon: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1491064075987873792
[5]: Op-ed by Nolan Lawson on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...
[6]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/09/safari-team-asks-for-fe...
Between that and the embed situation FF is clearly engaged in some sorta self-sabotage cycle.
My work? Yeah, they switched from Firefox to Chrome since Chrome updated their license faster. If you want to get FF installed on your laptop now, it takes an act of congress. Even as a developer you have to go through a process to get it installed; they discourage it that much. You also get a FF version that is about 4 versions older than the current stable version.
I don't recall this to be the case for Firefox (that may have changed by now?). So you can only use vanilla Firefox in a corporate managed profile.
When set as the default brower, it also provides the in-app web view to other apps (e.g. inside LinkedIn). There it works fine too (also with that cookie-deleting confidence), and it has a drop-down to "Open in Firefox Focus", which is rarely needed but I found it useful for the full experience outside the app web view. That opens near-instantly without reloading, as it just transfers the already open page state.
Just goes to show how cocky megacorps have gotten.
Google has been taking steps to decouple Chrome from the base OS for a bit now[0].
0. https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-...
Google is just going to keep coming up with new options we'll have to change, or silently change our settings following an update to allow more data collection, or even just ignore our settings and do whatever they want anyway.
You can't use untrustworthy user-hostile software and expect to not be constantly taken advantage of. Taking people's private data and handing it over to Google is what chrome was designed to do from day one.
Instead of asking users to uninstall Chrome, ask web devs to make sites compatible with something other than Chrome.
As an example, I would use Links a lot more if OpenWrt forum would work.
The screenshots in the article clearly illustrate a concerning trend: users are often subtly coerced into opting into certain features or settings without full awareness. This usually happens when they hurriedly click a prominent button like 'Got it' just to dismiss an annoying pop-up. It highlights a significant problem in UX where clarity and consent are traded for corporate gain. We need for more robust laws governing terms of service agreements, transparent pricing during sign-up processes, and the design of preference dialogs to ensure they are user-friendly and transparent. This is extremely user hostile.
Looks like this https://blog.incogni.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/enhanced...
Not the first time and not the last time they treat US customers differently because of this.
On the other hand, website domain names are often very specialized, which means that “Site suggested ads” can be very specific. These are the ads that follow you around. So far I’ve just deleted one that annoyed me.
It seems pretty controllable.
The idea is that instead of the dozens of third-party cookies placed on websites by different advertisers and tracking companies, Google itself will track your interests in the browser itself, controlling even more of the advertising ecosystem than it already does. Google calls this “enhanced ad privacy,” perhaps leaning into the idea that starting in 2024 they plan to “phase out” the third-party cookies that many advertisers currently use to track people. But the company will still gobble up your browsing habits to serve you ads, preserving its bottom line in a world where competition on privacy is pushing it to phase out third-party cookies.
I'm sorry that blocking cross-site tracking makes it harder for ad companies to make money, but that's just not my concern. My browser is supposed to act in _my_ interests. It's the _user_ agent, after all. I'm not going to give any sympathy to the company that built the internet into the ad-supported hellscape that it is when they now use their browser monopoly to try to protect their business model.
EDIT: this is disregarding the “everyone boycott display ads companies and we’ll kill the industry with the invisible hand of the market” but I don’t have a ton of faith in that one
Use Firefox instead. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Profiles have existed in FF for a very long time, I believe even back to the launch of Chrome. I think what Chrome did was made them readily accessible. I might have the history slightly wrong, but FF has had them at least as far back as 2011.
Can you please share where profiles have been requested for many years?
The part that has been requested is to make them accessible and first class and not tucked in behind screens that look like internal "power user" screens
It's pure doublespeak. Privacy is surveillance.
(Obvious response: "there are legal reasons why we can't do that, it'd be viewed as anticompetitive". Obvious response to the obvious response: "stop being simultaneously an ad company and a browser vendor and it would no longer be anticompetitive".)
“From what?”
“From what we’re gonna do to you if you don’t pay us for protection.”
This feature compared to that status quo is worse for privacy.
I think this might be the first time I’ve seen something that promises enhanced privacy instead doing directly the opposite, outside of the realm of malware and scam apps.
Imagine if there was a “save space on your hard drive” checkbox that used more storage space when it was checked. That’s what this is.
Fox guarding the hen house.
(Disclosure: until 1.5y ago I worked at Google, including on things related to the privacy sandbox.)
The enhanced privacy claim is honest and true; the benchmark is older versions of chrome.
*: See the UK CMA https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62052c52e90e0...
Of course, we all know why that can’t happen.
Having full access to your computer's memory, display, network, and all input devices.
it didn't feel like my ad privacy had been enhanced
You're using the product of a company who's main business is selling ads, what privacy are you expecting to get?
That's like using McDonald's & Coca-Cola for the school cafeteria catering service and expecting to get a heathy and nutritious meal.
Google took note and is now building and offering more "privacy tools".
It's reminiscent of turning off Bluetooth and WiFi in the Settings on iPhones, only to find out they still emit radio waves.
1. Try using the Privacy Sandbox APIs on your own site to confirm they don't work.
2. Examine your Chrome profile to make sure it doesn't contain ad topics or ad measurement data.
3. Sniff network traffic to ensure Chrome is not sending anything sensitive to Google (using SSLKEYLOGFILE so you can decrypt HTTPS connections).
EFF's article ought to be clearer that all of the privacy sandbox logic happens on your own device rather than Google servers.
Google is an advertising company that only makes money with the shitty part of the internet which is why that part is expanding.
The chrome plated gmail cohorts have been educated to read for free and publish for compensation. They need a shitty internet to thrive, post and "make something awesome" in.
The shitty internet is doing fine and raising the participants it needs.
The free internet is indestructible and made by people who care. And of course it belongs to the minority.
5 years ago I used to get adverts for things like films which I would often watch the whole way through. Today I get adverts for phones and Chromebook. It’s like google are unable to sell adverts that actually target me and instead just throw their own rubbish I have no interest in, and even if I did they are not using the right features (I think they said that a Chromebook can run something by adobe? A company I haven’t run any tools from for about 20 years).
I guess they don’t have much data on me as I don’t do google other than YT and sometimes maps on the desktop, but the adverts aren’t even based on the types of youtube videos I watch, they feel like very generic adverts for products I don’t want.
I would consider this a good thing.
My wife and I were talking the other night at a friends who have an Alexa in their kitchen. We were talking about taking a ski trip out West to Colorado or Utah.
We get the car to leave. She pops open her Facebook feed and wouldn't you know? She's getting ads for resorts in. . .wait for it. . . .Colorado and Utah along with the two places were thinking of going.
I was creeped TF out because this wasn't the first time its happened and the other two times, we weren't near a listening device like an Alexa and similar things have happened.
If they don't know your preferences, then you're doing something right.
It’s much more benign, but Facebook definitely does advertise things to a whole group it guesses (usually correctly) were located together.
i bet you were also talking about a bunch of other things, that didn't show up in the FB feed.
I know logically and rationally how it works in a broad fashion.
But yet I swear that sometimes it feels like something is listening to my conversations!
For instance:
the other night in my Hotel Room, I watched Last Week Tonight which was about Elon Musk.
I turn off the TV, and shortly afterwards check Instagram.
And Boom! I’m seeing Ads for Starlink.
It does freak you out a bit!
I had only my iPhone with me. So no Alexa or Google devices.
But still…. Coincidence or not, it’s disconcerting!
Its not that easy, but poisoning the data can be done.
Yes, Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) do allow businesses to upload customer email addresses and phone numbers for advertising purposes, under specific conditions. This process is part of what's known as "Custom Audiences."
1. *Google Customer Match:* Google allows businesses to upload a list of email addresses through their Google Ads service. This feature, known as Customer Match, lets advertisers target or retarget their advertisements to these customers across Google products like Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail. Businesses must comply with Google's policies and data protection laws.
2. *Meta Custom Audiences:* Similarly, Meta (Facebook) offers a feature called Custom Audiences, where businesses can upload lists of emails or phone numbers. These are then used to match users on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms in Meta's network for targeted advertising. The data is hashed to protect user privacy, and the businesses must have the right to use this data.
Both companies emphasize privacy and the necessity for businesses to have obtained the data lawfully and with the user's consent. Users also have tools at their disposal to control their ad preferences and understand why they are seeing certain ads. It's a balance between effective targeted advertising and user privacy, governed by both internal policies and external regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Google and Meta are building social graphs across this uploaded information.
Wait. Doesn't that just mean that google collects 500 bits of information about you? How is that not considered an ID? I don't understand.
Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before. For an epoch a site can only get at most 1 topic. The browser will return topics for up to the last 3 epochs (the site only gets data for the epochs it has called the API in)
The Topics API itself only returns up to three topic IDs to websites, not 500 bits for all topics. But that still gives trackers up to 500 * 499 * 498 (124,251,000) topic combinations that can be paired with other fingerprintable user information like GeoIP, language, browser version, and operating system.
The opposite--tying it to a persistent widespread account--seems creepier overall.