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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I am not convinced this is ever going to actually happen. Google won't roll this out until they are sure that their new solution basically has the same effect for advertisers as cookies, but with a new fancy name with "privacy" in it (when its anything but).

Google needs to be forced to spin out Chrome to someone else, it is a clear conflict of interest when nearly every (or every? are there any that haven't?) other browser has already taken steps for actual privacy instead of dressing up a new tracking system.

While we wait for this to never happen, we should be encouraging everyone to use any other browser so google doesn't have the marketshare to strong-arm the web anymore.

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That doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. Google has been trying to make this transition happen for years. The CMA is the one strong-arming them into maintaining the status quo. The article even mentions 39 new concerns raised which has resulted in yet another extension.

Without this interference, third-party party cookies would have been dead years ago.

Privacy sandbox is not private, that's why ICO(UK's privacy watchdog) raised concerns,https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-cookies-replacement-not-enou...

Sorry, I'm not a WSJ subscriber. It wouldn't surprise me if Google are being squeezed between two organizations with different goals though.

Ultimately the Privacy Sandbox has dozens of different proposals, and each is on a separate standards track. It's not a singular technology.

I will say that many of the proposals do directly improve user privacy, or offer more-private alternatives to existing APIs. But I'd also be surprised if there weren't objections as well. It's the web, and scrutiny is important.

It's at least as private as third party cookies. And unlike third party cookies there is a path to improve privacy as technology improves.

Some of the required technologies (private model training, debuggable trusted execution environments) are still research topics, so some sacrifices have to be made until it can be deployed.

This isn't Google strong-arming the web. This is Google desperately wanting to turn off third-party cookies, and being told again and again by regulators that they aren't allowed to do so.

But isn't that a direct by-product of Chrome being owned by Google.

If Chrome was made by an independent company regulators couldn't care less if they disabled third party cookies.

We honestly can't know whether the regulators would care, or whether they would be making different decisions.

But that counterfactual seems totally irrelevant to the claims the GP was making?

We actually do since other browsers have blocked third party cookies for a several years now.

Google has strong armed the web in other situations with Chrome, there are multiple cases of them implementing things that google has proposed to w3c but has not been accepted yet.

Regarding this, it's been 4 years. I am not letting google off the hook with this, especially when many other browsers already block third party cookies.

I stand by my opinion that an ad company operating a browser is a clear conflict of interest. If they didn't, this "privacy" feature would never have been a thing and this would have been done years ago.

> there are multiple cases of them implementing things that google has proposed to w3c but has not been accepted yet.

Yes but the question is why is anyone using those things when they are only supported in a single browser? If its not fully supported by the major 4 browsers then its not getting put in my code, simple.

Who regulates 3rd party cookies (aside from Warren G)?

In this specific instance, as the article says, the delay is because the CMA (the UK competition authority) needs more time to evalute the feedback from Google's competitors on the proposal.

But regulators from both the US and the EU have made similar statements.

The question that you need to ask is why they desperately want to get rid of them.

The answert is that the solution they are proposing hinders other ad compnies and give google unfair advantage in the ad space. Hence the they are not allowed to do for competition reasons.

> Google won't roll this out until they are sure that their new solution basically has the same effect for advertisers as cookies

Google actually has interest for new solution having weak performance, since it will shift Ads funds from 3p sites to their own properties(search, youtube, maps) where 3p are not as critical.

Totally. They do that with PAIR nowadays.

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