Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.
Google’s refusal to join Firefox’ and WebKit’s strong privacy positions is both entirely unsurprising and wholly sad. Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, and while I have no doubt Chrome engineers themselves would love to make their browser and engine more privacy-conscious, Google itself obviously has no incentive to do so.
This needs to be discussed more and I appreciate the author’s point by point rebuttal. Google has such a large footprint everywhere that it’s hard to remain private. It doesn’t help that most people shrug their shoulders and give in to all the data mining, normalizing it. When that happens, companies and politicians stop taking privacy seriously, which hurts the rest of us.
As misguided as some aspects of the GDPR are, I’m glad at least someone is attempting to tackle user privacy. Here in the US we don’t have strong rights. Even banks sell private data to advertisers. US law gives consumers the right to opt out, but we can’t do so permanently and you have to remember to do it every single year. If you accidentally let your opt-out status lapse, your transaction data’s already been sold to advertisers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23/google-now-knows-when-you-are-at-a-cash-register-and-how-much-you-are-spending/
I opted out a few months back, but man did they make it difficult…of course they don’t let you do it online, I was on the phone for about an hour, which is a total waste of time but if you value your privacy you don’t have a choice. Most people don’t even realize this goes on. Unfortunately the politicians that allow this to happen are just as scummy as the companies involved.
I pretty much use Firefox and Duckduckgo aith ublock wnabled everywhere I go. If a site pops up and complains that I am blocking ads or not allowing them to track, I go to a different site. If I visit a site often enough and they ask for donations instead of being ad-laden garbage, then I will set up a donation. My goal is to live life without having to see a bunch of garbage I don’t care about thrown my way. I suggest others do the same. Get companies to start respecting their customers, instead of treating us as just another data point.
Two points in the articles
1) If cookies are blocked then everyone will fingerprint
2) if true privacy arrives, then content won’t be free.
I think they’re both wrong on point 1. Fingerprinting is a hoarse out of the barn. Fighting that is really really difficult. Google is right thats the next level, but wrong to say blocking cookies is bad because of that. It will happen precisely because as google notes its really difficult to shake a fingerprint. But Freedom to Tinker is wrong in thinking fingerprinting isn’t inevitable, because it is.
Point 2 goes to Google. They’re completely right. Targeted ads are more valuable to advertisers than random. Its so freaking obvious that’s the case it kind of blows Freedom to Think’s credibility to argue otherwise. If you get rid of it some other funding mechanism will have to take the place of those ad revenues to support content providers.