You do know that Google is a web advertising company first?

If they're proposing something, you can be damned sure that it was vetted first by people who know how to use it for ad tracking - because that's literally their bread and butter.

Chrome will never: ban 3rd party cookies, tell which sites track you etc. They're not going to shoot themselves in the foot without a plan.

There is no situation where Google will actually care about privacy, since their whole business model exists on the fact that they know everything about their users so they can target ads better.

Their security people are top-notch. They guard your data very diligently. If they did not, you would not trust them with intimate details about your life.

Your privacy is the same. They will keep your data private *from their competitors*, but they will fully enjoy using it for their own purposes.

It is ludicrous to think that an advertising company, whose value proposition is precisely in its ability to target users accurately, would willingly impair their ability to do so.

They will, however, gladly make it difficult for their competition.

At all.

It will ban 3rd party cookies the moment Google decides it's time to kill off most of their competition. They have Chrome installed on most people's computers and smartphones so they hold tremendous power to dictate the direction of the web, while they keep tracking people through the browser, with a user login, basically cookie-less.

"Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years [from January 2020]." -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

Want to bet on whether Chrome still supports third-party cookies, say, by the end of 2023?

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

How?

Sort of like saying: "I hope no one is saying having a tracker in your car is worse than having a guy following you around."

Sure, it's better. But it's not good either.

> This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away.

Here's a crazy idea. We don't need either Google's monopoly preserving Privacy "Sandbox" or third party cookies... and we don't need to do away with web advertising. We're not in a black and white world.

Google can advertise on their home page and make money without all the crazy tracking bullshit. We know they can, because that's how they funded all the bullshit tracking.

Safari has effectively disabled third party cookies. Nothing broke. Chrome has announced that they will do the same in 2022. However, unlike Apple, Google doesn't want to cannibalize the ad industry so they decided to introduce this Privacy Sandbox which allows targeted advertising without sending a personal identifier to the server.

The article that we are discussing is saying that this Privacy Sandbox will favor Google Ads. The top comment said that this article is likely astroturfing. It written by people affiliated with other ad networks, whose goal is to water down the Privacy Sandbox proposal so that it enables more tracking.

Some people have said that they don't trust Google to implement Privacy Sandbox in a privacy friendly way, so it shouldn't exist at all. But that was never really on the table.

I don't think there is a misunderstanding at all.

Fundamentally, Google—A company which has a history of over-reaching and lying about it—is implementing a solution which allows them to continue doing what Google does as best it can given the current atmosphere.

They could do what the other browser makers have done and just eliminate 3rd party cookies. They could make this feature opt in. The fact that people seem determined to assert Google must have this feature and we are all somehow better for it is absurd.

Edit: In retrospect there does seem to be a fundamental mis-understanding of sorts. If you fundamentally trust Google, I suppose this whole thing looks different with rose colored lenses on.

The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves.

Otherwise how are Youtube creators, newspapers, Firefox, etc going to operate with out it?

Companies adding multiple megabytes of JS tools is probably another issue entirely as they often involve a variety of crap like 2-3 ad publishers, content recommendation services (chum), 5 different analytics and automation tools from "marketing", regulatory compliance modals/monitoring, e-commerce tools. And all of this is before the regular JS stuff is added (CNN for ex: adds both jQuery, backbone.js, AND React). Those issues are solved by competent web teams and for certain market segments of mega-firms this likely wont go away any time soon, so the ad blocks (really JS blockers) will remain.

Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end.

I haven't see the stats on retargeting, but I wouldn't mind that goes (across 3rd-parties).

But I do see some value in demographic and behavioural ad targeting. If I have to see ads then I'd prefer they be targeted at me. I'm not sure what the solution here is but, outside of pseudo-anonymization.

Because at the end of the day all that matters privacy-wise is identity. I could feed an ad engine locally with my attributes without directly revealing identity, as is largely the case today. But even that is a tradeoff.

Don't go there, please. At the very least it reveals you don't understand what "defined the police" means, and at worst you're insulting those who are living in constant fear and daily trauma. There are better analogies to use.

Furthermore, I reject the claim that a significant number of people are living in constant fear and daily trauma in any western democracy. Such an extraordinary claim requires solid proof - statistical proof that people are suffering psychological and/or physical trauma.

Now regarding the original claim itself, there's certainly those that take it literally: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol....

And according to Wilfred Reilly it's actually happening: "In Los Angeles, similarly, the police budget was reduced by $150,000,000 “following calls to defund the police after George Floyd’s May 25 death.” By November 12th of the past year, these cuts had already resulted in the dissolution of the department’s entire Animal Cruelty Task Force, and more notably of the Sexual Assault/Special Victims unit “that investigated disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein."

Did you really think that such a clear statement supported by politicians and mass media will not have any effects in the real world?

Note that the topic of this discussion is Internet advertising. I would love to hear your opinion on how comparing the Internet advertising industry to the struggle for racial justice is promoting free thought and open discourse. Actually, I wouldn't, because any such comparison is absurd and is not initiating the conversation in good faith.

> Furthermore, I reject the claim that a significant number of people are living in constant fear and daily trauma in any western democracy

Note that I made no such claim. I would, however, love to hear your experience as a BIPOC in America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

I use privacy badger as an ad blocker, even though it does not target ads. It somehow block privacy intrusive domains, which happen to be related to ads.

Not go away. Just have their ability to invade privacy spayed and neutered. If it makes the industry smaller in aggregate, I'll take that as a beneficial side effect.

I wrote the following, as a comment on HN, more than 5 years ago. https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html

I had a chuckle from this, but many here seem to be taking the statement at face value.

Any evidence of that? Also, anti-advertising is not anti-business. And the good thing with a nightmare is that it disappears once you open your eyes and see what the reality actually is like.

I see this tact in almost every thread about Google and Facebook. Right along with "HN (users) are against any advertising". This sort of ad-hominem approach to debate is non-constructive and frankly bullshit.

HN advertises. It's owned and operated by an actual profit making business. Nobody complains about that. People don't mind because fundamentally we know when we leave HackerNews, YCombinator isn't following us.

The consensus is largely not anti-business, it is against tracking.

If I'm anti-business, does that make you a Google shill? Let's try to talk about the topic and not the attitude of the people here.

Sure let's go back to the ol' day where business would reach out to their clientele only on bill boards and news papers. Oh wait, I guess I should apply for a physical newspaper subscription too!

If advertisers can't violate one's privacy, that simply means they will pay less to the websites one uses, and that will lead to its quality deteriorating, or even more extreme content filters to appease advertisers and remain afloat.

Why? Businesses ad spend budgets aren't going to be reduced simply because ads no longer track people. The same amount of money will go to advertisers. So long as ad companies can deliver a better return than other forms of advertising that competes for those budgets the online ad companies will be fine.

If advertisement be less capable of generating new customers, then it is less valuable.

The amount of money one can sell an advert for to the advertiser is of course related to expected return value for the advertiser of that ad.

If it be lower, due to less efficient targeting, then he will not be willing to pay as much for the same advertisement.

To be clear, I'm not saying the above effect will definitely happen, only pointing out that other outcomes are possible. In practice it will be some combination of the two.

The value something provides is relative to other things you might buy instead. If I have an ad budget of $1m, and I can't spend it on targeted ads then I'm going to spend it on the next best thing - if that's non-targeted ads then websites will still get my $1m.

The very reason that adverts are then worth less, is because advertisement budgets will go down, given that advertisements provide less return for their money.

It's not an assumption. I've worked in web stuff, including a lot of ad-driven businesses and businesses that buy ads, for a little over two decades. If one technology is removed businesses will spend the money on a different one. They will never step back and say "Oh well, I guess we'll have to spend less on advertising now."

It's even reasonable to believe a reduction in the effectiveness of ads would get companies to spend more on adverts in order to maintain the same level of growth.

Of course they do, what weird assumption is this?

If we lived in a world where advertisement was twice as effective at generating new revenue, far more money would be spent on it; if we lived in a world where it did nothing, no money would be spent on it and companies would search for other means to get new customers than advertisement.

It is certainly not as though the advertisement budged that companies have simply be a number they cling to on religious principle, rather than a number they have decided upon based on their perceived value of advertisement.

Even if you fully believe that privacy invasive targeted advertising is “the most effective” advertising, if it goes away the second best form of advertising will then become “the most effective” and will eat the lions share of the advertising spend. Or perhaps the market will dictate that instead of “targeted ads”, the most effective strategy will be to split the old google/Facebook ad spend across a combination of older (or newer) ad forms.

Toyota still want to sell Corollas. TAG still want to sell watches. So long as there’s a form of advertising that’s better than not advertising at all, the aggregate of all competitive sales teams will work out how to soak up all my budget somehow. Something will still me the most effective advertising. They’ll still spend their money to get more of that.

(If it turns out to be billboards or movie product placements or something, that’ll suck for web people who’s only possible way to sell advertising is banner ads, but that’s a different argue,ent...)

The reason non-privacy invasive advertising is worth less is that tracking is more effective, so it changes the balance. If tracking becomes less effective, advertising money is more likely to go elsewhere than disappear.

And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion. It's the ad based content creators who are lacking in diversity, not the passionate creators who go in deep the rabbit hole.

Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users.

Both examples you listed are products that are feasibly created by the many small contributors. Many products cannot feasibly be created in such a manner and rely on some manner of income to remain feasible.

There are quite a few content creators that are capable of producing content because their efforts are supported by advertisement. It would be hard for them to operate on the many small contributions-model.

> And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion.

Few men enjoy the luxury to devote so much time to their passions when other parts of their time are allocated to securing the income they need to feed themselves.

> Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users.

This situation would indeed benefit the visitor more; it would not benefit the advertiser, nor the middleman, nor the space where the advertisement stands.

I have a feeling that to some extent this part is made unnecessarily hard due to how the capitalistic economy insists on employing all available resources in “productive” pursuits of producing even more content...

Perhaps not “content” all the time. But surely a lot of resources are spent towards wasteful, if not directly anti-productive, ends. Trading those for more leisure time might very well be a boon for economy

Ad spend is not going down. Yet publisher revenue is stagnant or worse. Look at every media outlet scaling back and/or crying poverty. This is the gateway to most of the worst of the advertising ecosystem. Nobody WANTS sleazy/creepy/loud/excessive ads on their sites, because it's their brand being ran down in the end. But it's seen as the only way to keep their heads above water.

I suspect the real story here is the growth of the middlemen and platforms. In 1990, when you called up your local newspaper and ordered a quarter-page ad for $50, the publisher got every cent of it. Now, you buy $50 of PPC ads, it gets routed through several layers of cross-selling and arbitrage, and $5 is actually distributed to publishers.

I'm surprised nobody's built a mutually owned co-op ad network. That would allow the participants to recapture most of the value lost to third party intermediaries. With so much less revenue leakage, they could offer tamer adds that paid as well as the current 82 banners, full tracking, and a chumbox design.

If you understand how cookies work then this is a perfectly viable option for you. If you don’t, you likely don’t care about advertisers tracking you.

People who care they are being tracked will take the time to learn how stop being tracked. That’s why I learned about cookies etc.

I think this is probably a way for google to assert further control over the advertising industry, using the guise of improving user privacy. Like I said, most users don’t really care because if they did they would just disable cookies, so I think they are solving a problem no one is actually having and that seems suspicious.

The latter doesn't scale to millions of stalkees with almost zero cost, and is far less conspicuous.

Given that, why should I not be skeptical of their Privacy Sandbox initiative?

I make no statement that Project Sandbox should not be scrutinized -- merely that it's better than third party cookies -- and I don't believe increased antitrust scrutiny of Google will lead to better user privacy.

I respectfully disagree and defend the position you're replying to. I take issue with your provocation because I fear that asserting too much focus on a still-frame snapshot without looking at the full motion, that seems misguided. Politics constitute the motion around any spec snapshot.

Focussing only on the technical merit of the proposal without also prioritizing the living, moving context around it, that's advocating a sort of blindness imho

The problem is that nobody is bringing these two together. Don't just focus on context without reading the actual proposal. Your comment says nothing about the technical proposal.

It's the largest, most invasive and pervasive privacy intrusion in history, and its beneficiaries includes many HN regulars.

3rd party cookies should be replaced with _nothing_, not this "privacy" API.

Besides, it's not wrong to listen to the losers; you might learn about some unfair competition.

I'm far more afraid of Google strengthening its monopoly, on general principle.

I wrote up a more nuanced version of this opinion here:

* Privacy Sandbox: Google's answer to privacy-conscious advertising -- https://dafoster.net/articles/2021/02/04/privacy-sandbox-goo...

Another component of Privacy Sandbox is Turtledove (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove), where advertisers can tag a user as belonging to a "interest group" and then later on can target ads against that interest group. Which groups a user is in is maintained entirely by the browser, and never sent to the server, And any ads that are rendered based on interest group targeting have to execute in a special "fenced frame" which prevents them from leaking information to the surrounding page or to the advertiser in a non-aggregated way.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, so I'm following these proposals. Speaking only for myself)

Thanks for the clarification Jeff.

> Another component of Privacy Sandbox is Turtledove (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove), [...]. Which groups a user is in is maintained entirely by the browser, and never sent to the server

Interesting. I'll plan to read up on this tonight and amend my post from what I learn.

It doesn't need to be worse for it to be unacceptable to privacy-concerned folks which don't trust Google. It is just about the same to them since an untrustable entity like Google is stewarding it.

Which BTW makes it worse since the solution is basically putting trust in Google which just brings on more and undefined privacy issues.

> the solution is basically putting trust in Google

None of the privacy sandbox proposals require trusting Google: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

The EU has both antitrust and privacy concerns with big tech, but it‘s different fronts.

But you could argue that advertisers are people too, and that Google are using their monopoly to reduce competition and drive up prices for a segment of the population.

Is there a rule that says if antitrust benefits one segment of people and hurts another the it's OK?

Dismantle google to smaller companies and separate all the parts (from android, search engine to google earth) away from advertising part. Prevent them from sharing data. Dismantle facebook. Separate it from advertising part.

THEN we can praise Privacy Sandbox. The alternative is to NOT use chrome. Switch to Firefox.

Praising "privacy sandbox" where browser doesnt allow you to logout from your google account doesnt solve anything. I do care if there is 300 inefficient tracking companies in exchange for one that is extremely efficient and can push other 3rd party sites to use it. What do you think will happen?

First, other advertisers will be killed, google would offer its identifier to the sites and suddenly you wont be able to surf anywhere without google account and chrome. Nope, thank you very much for such "privacy sandbox".