A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.
The New Wilderness (Idle Words)
An excellent piece by Maciej on the crucial difference between individual privacy and ambient privacy (and what that means for regulation):
Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.
Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.
That is not consent.
For more detail, I highly recommend reading his testimony to the senate hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy.
Related links
My love-hate affair with technology | Read the Tea Leaves
A very open and honest post by Nolan on trying to live with technology without sacrificing privacy.
Signal >> Blog >> The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you
The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.
You can try to use Facebook’s own tools to make the invisible visible but that kind of transparency isn’t allowed.
A quick look at privacy-focused analytics for small sites
A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.
Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know. | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Following on from the piece they ran called Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, the EFF now have the details of the origin trial and it’s even worse than what was originally planned.
I strongly encourage you to use a privacy-preserving browser like Firefox or Safari.
Related posts
Ad tech
It is not the job of browser makers to prop up business models, especially ones that don’t even work.
The cage
Responding to a very bad take on surveillance capitalism.
Get the FLoC out
Google Chrome is prioritising third parties over end users.
Prediction
What I’m hoping for in 2021.
Clean advertising
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.