OK Google: Let's see what you're saying about privacy

Google has been known for many things, but privacy has not been one of them. One of their primary means of revenue has been their advertizing system that includes personalized adveritising and tracking. While browsing the Internet Superhighway, I learned they made a blog post annoucing the end of personalized/tracked ads.

This post will be a little strange, as I'll be appending thoughts as I read. I'll give a summary of my thoughts at the end. Before I even begin, I want to state that I'm probably more accepting of Google than I should be - I believe that some of their tracking is used for legitimate purposes (such as location tracking for live traffic updates - this doesn't mean that location data isn't used maliciously too).

It's difficult to conceive of the internet we know today — with information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people — without advertising as its economic foundation.

From the very first line, we can see one of the unfortunate truths of the modern Internet: advertising has funded many of the largest platforms. It provides a way that people don't need to pay directly for services. Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc all use advertising as away to get money to support those services. Many music streaming services offer a free tier with advertising but a higher tier without. The majority of free apps on both Google and Apple's app stores rely on adveritising for money.

It isn't a great solution, but it is a convenient one. I've been slowly working toward either self-hosting, using paid options, or using ad-free open source things and supporting development for those tools.

Today, we're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

Two thoughts on this:
1. This is a really good step forward! Good on you, Google. 2. Talk is cheap. Prove what you're saying to your users. I want this to be true, but companies have lied before.

We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people's email addresses. We don't believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment.

Some of what I've seen in response to this has been focused on the regulatory part - that this is just a response to recent lawsuits in an attempt to get some good press. It's certainly good timing for it... but they aren't wrong that consumers are expecting more privacy. Ad blockers are popular now. Some browsers, such as Brave, include one by default. Arch Linux's official repositories include not one, but two different ad blockers for Firefox.

Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.

FLoC, the linked API, is an interesting system. Instead of giving a person a unique identifier, the client-side will add the user to a group of common-interest people called a "cohort". Cohort identifiers are designed to be short - the example given is "43A7" - as to not contain detailed information about the individual. There's a lot more about the system, but as nice as it is, it is a topic for another time. Good start though.

Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2. Chrome also will offer the first iteration of new user controls in April...

Again, talk is cheap. I like what I'm hearing, but I'll need to wait until it can be proven.

Keeping the internet open and accessible for everyone requires all of us to do more to protect privacy — and that means an end to not only third-party cookies, but also any technology used for tracking individual people as they browse the web.

Agreed. As people learn that one invasive technology is replacing another, they'll move to replace it.

There is a fair amount I didn't respond to because I didn't find it necessary, but generally speaking, I think Google is on the right track here... if they are telling the truth. Google almost has a monopoly in the browser market. This is especially true when considering that almost all alternatives except Firefox and Safari use Google's engine in their browsers.

I want this to be true. I really do. But talk is cheap, especially from companies like Google.