Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny

Re:Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing anti... by 0xy on Thursday February 04, 2021 @06:46PM (#26031168)

The disconnect here seems to be that your position is that burying it in an obscure highly technical document is "disclosure", whereas 99.9999% of Chrome users don't even know this document exists, let alone how to find it or even how to read it.

That practice is worse than Facebook. Facebook at least makes some effort to explain privacy implications to users in human readable text that most people can understand.

So I still feel comfortable calling it an undisclosed and impossible to disable feature. Because for the vast majority of users, this is the case. It's not disclosed to them unless they go digging through websites for highly technical whitepapers they don't understand and can't read.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google’s approach to replacing the cookie is drawing anti... by joshuamorton on Thursday February 04, 2021 @07:45PM (#26031692)

It's also mentioned explicitly, in plain language, in the privacy policy[0], which links to the whitepaper. This section, or something functionally equivalent has been present since (at least, that's as far back as you can check) 2014, still in plain language. The 2014 version links to a 2012 chromium blog post announcing that announced the fancy new field trials infrastructure[1]. Please stop lying about this it was not, and has not ever been "buried" or "undisclosed".

Of course, the privacy policy doesn't explain the precise methodology of how the telemetry is sent, so there's no "oh its done via an http header", because it's a nontechnical explanation with the goal of informing users how their data is being used, and not of giving them details of the method.

[0]: https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/, search "field trials"

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/changes-to-field-trials-in...

[ Parent | on HN ]