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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t Google refusing to make changes that boost online privacy because it’ll tank their ad revenue?

But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.

If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"

It’s horizontal tying.

If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).

The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.

Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.

Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.

As much as I find Chrome’s ownership and market share problematic, that doesn’t seem fair.

What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?

(Except if you mean that any new and initially exclusive feature bolsters Chrome’s dominance further, in which case I’d somewhat agree.)

> What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?

Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.

Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.

How would you use WebUSB or Web Bluetooth for device fingerprinting?

HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?

The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).

> why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?

Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.

There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:

Web Bluetooth: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95

Web USB: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

Web MIDI: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58

Web Serial: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

Here’s some Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063

Or things like Web USB start getting used to provide useful features without needing to install whole apps, like mouse/keyboard dongle pairing, phone OS flashing, etc.

As far as fingerprinting/tracking goes, I have never seen a random site prompt for these features, only apps where it makes sense.

Same here, so I'm really not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'd be really curious to hear any examples of sites doing that!

"Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google"

What does this mean?

"We already have this feature in Chrome, why would we let you add it to Chromium?"

The monopoly the DoJ is trying to break up isn't Chrome, it's Search. From TFA:

> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.

> I don't see how that equates to a monopoly

The monopoly is in ads. Google uses its control of Chrome to act uncompetitively in advertising.

Monopolies aren't bad per se. Monopolies are bad because they allow you to abuse the market and consumers. If you can be similarly abusive without a full monopoly that's equally bad.

Such as to track their every move and exploit or sell that data.

>Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.

With what funding? Chrome loses money. Edge loses money. Safari loses money. Firefox loses Google's money. Brave loses VC money.

Without some endless source of money, funding you for an ulterior motive, you can't compete with them. Which is why:

>For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case.

The anti-competitive practices ensure there can't be effective competition.

Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?

I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?

M3 seems to be failing, but I agree that it matters that the tried.

>I do realize you can still use uBlock

No, you can't. You can use "uBlock origin lite" which is the manifest v3 version that doesn't work correctly.

No. They're not doing those changes because regulators like the DOJ[0] threatened them with anti-trust action if they did. That's the same DOJ that's now asking for Chrome to be divested.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-doj-cookies-privac...

Uh. That was not my understanding of that situation.

Blocking third party cookies this way still leaves Google’s tools which people voluntarily install with access to data that now nobody else has access to.

Everyone else's ad revenue. The UK computing regulator is the main player here.

Quite the opposite, Google is the key sponsor of Privacy Sandbox: https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/

Working out why they're doing this is left as an exercise to the reader.

The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.

A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".

The entire point of Privacy Sandbox is to get away from tracking individuals and allow ad targeting of anonymous cohorts (interest groups) instead.

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/private-advert...

The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.

Blocking third-party cookies is a big privacy win. Getting untargeted ads is not something 99.9% of people care about and getting rid of actual real spying opportunities is great.

We all know this is going to push tracking server side but at least that makes it expensive and dangerous for companies that run it. Cloud costs for the hardware, and having to run third party code on your servers, built by known creeps.

But we should still make it harder on them.

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