Cookies are soon to be a thing of the past; Google wants to play in the Sandbox instead. It might sound rather twee, but this marks a seismic shift in the online ecosystem that will affect us all.
“a secure environment for personalisation that also protects user privacy”.
That’s an oxymoron.
One solution left:
Reject internet
Return to Usenet
There are actually 2 more options in my opinion.
- Support Gopher and Gemini by making content for them and ask your favorite content creators if they would be interested in mirroring their content there.
- Use minimal browsers like Links, Lynx, Dillo and Netsurf and only browser minimal and well designed websites.
Between the light gray text and meandering presentation that was physically and mentally difficult to read but what I got from it is:
Google doesn’t need actual cookies anymore, fingerprinting is it. They have a huge advantage on those who do. Moreover they will offer a recapcha-like web api that others can use with a privacy budget to determine approximately who the user is.
Is that about it?
Oh god please no, I hate having to deal with recaptcha enough already (and that’s just the visible recaptcha version), I really don’t want to worry/deal with another variant as well.
Each call to an API will reveal more about a user. “Websites can call APIs until those calls have revealed enough information to narrow a user down to a group sufficiently large enough to maintain anonymity”, said Schuh. Any further attempts will be blocked, however.
I’d be interested in how that is decided, and how those calls are shared beyond the first call.
Also this bit was fun:
But Rhodes said there were some good things to come from the proposal. He said “cross-device tracking” of users should be easier through a browser-based solution, “because if you’re in Chrome you’ll be signed in to Chrome across all your devices I would assume.
“So if you watch an ad on Youtube, click through on your phone, and then buy that holiday later on your desktop, at the moment it’s actually quite tricky for us to know that that [ad] has had any impact, or have data which suggests that’s had an impact, whereas with browser-based tracking you can at least do that.”
He added: “It should be easier to track what people do, so from Google’s perspective it’s easier for them to have a better understanding of who you are, which ultimately leads to a better ability to buy advertising. But all of that’s wrapped up in the fact that it’s provided by Google.
if you’re in Chrome you’ll be signed in to Chrome across all your devices I would assume.
wouldn’t it be convenient if Google doesn’t fund mozilla in 2022 and the only safe browsers left are Chrome and Safari.
There is always ungoogled-chromium.
Agreed, hopefully there will continue to be alternatives, but whether they pass the cookie-replacing fingerprint api test is another matter.
OMG, this is so stupid… on one hand they say “subversion of user choice is wrong” but then when users are given a choice then they say ““quite a significant proportion of people” are not accepting cookies when prompted online” … “Where we are at the moment is not ideal,”".
So they want users to not have a choice but make them feel as if they have? WTF is wrong with this people. Can this companies realize that nobody wants them and just stop refusing to die already!?
This is horrible. Any “solution” for “people are not accepting cookies” will just reinforce Google’s dominance over private data. This “sandbox” solutions is more of a Google’s jail for your private data that they will let some people who pay them to get a pass.
What about just delegalize any company that does forced tracking including Google and Facebook instead of pretending something is being done here about this…
The rest of the people in Earth are stupid.
As long as they exist, Google will continue exploiting them.
I was one of these people until I started looking into how Google makes money… Given all this is rather technical I can’t expect most people to understand this.
I don’t understand many things like food safety and somehow if I buy stuff in the market I don’t get poisoned, so it can be done.
I was too.
Sadly, I gave away to them a lot of stuff about me. They know too much.
And not a single mention of morality was dropped in this article. Always nice to see the other side’s perspective, just to know again that I really don’t have to feel bad, if they go bankrupt.
