Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021

by ghshephard • 5 years ago

670 320 5 years ago

nibsfive• 5 years ago

Google is by far the most privacy respecting data company on earth. Between this, not using Gmail, not operating in China for ethical reasons, it's not clear what more people could want. Don't use it if it doesn't work for you, but it's clearly being handled thoughtfully.

jMyles3• 5 years ago

what more people could want

Open source audits of manipulative algorithms. It's really that simple.

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

Independent audits I could understand, but open-source? That's a big fraction of their "secret sauce". I don't know if that's a reasonable ask.

sn_master4• 5 years ago

Many modern ML algorithms aren't clear on how they make decisions even if you have the code generating the models themselves.

newbie578• 5 years ago

You are honestly right, but no one will admit it. Apple is imo the worst of the big tech, willingly working with CCP but you won’t hear a bad word about them here, as long as the new Mac has a working keyboard which Apple themselves broke several iterations before...

seaman19212• 5 years ago

sorry to see reasonable opinions getting bullied for no reason

hughw• 5 years ago

“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.”

StevePerkins• 5 years ago

"Instead, Google says its ad-buying tools will use new technologies it has been developing with others in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple websites. One such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their own devices, and allows advertisers to target aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts,” rather than individual users."

I'm having a hard time parsing this out, and seeing what's actually changed. How do they determine an individual's "cohort(s)", without collecting information about that individual across multiple websites?

Is it simply that the data is collected and processed client-side, rather than server-side? Would using a non-Chrome browser effectively opt-out altogether, then? I find this difficult to believe.

cjg2• 5 years ago

The idea is that they group you with N other similar people where N is large enough to anonymise you enough to stop the worst complaints but small enough that advertisers still find it useful.

Some sort of principal component analysis to determine your "cohort".

An advertiser isn't that interested that you are you. They care that you are, for example, 55 with an interest in gardening and have been looking at lawnmower review sites.

derekp7• 5 years ago

So if I look up the specs on a pair of Bose QC-35's, I won't get internet-stalked with ads for that specific pair of headphones for the next 3 weeks whenever I pull up a weather report? But in stead I may see an uptick in general audiophile ads if I'm constantly reading articles about new gear that comes out? At least that sounds like a partial win in my book -- the first case was too creepy because it was so blatant. The second one may be worse because it is more subtle, but it creeps me out less for some reason. Kind of like how 2-3 decades ago when computer magazines were a thing, I kind of expected ads for computer parts in those magazines.

Edit: Actually, come to think about it, I wonder how people would have felt in the 80's if they got one of several editions of a newspaper based on magazines that they also subscribed to. Households that subscribed to fitness magazines would get a newspaper with more gym membership and weightlifting gear ads, and households that received woodworking magazines would have more Craftsman ads in their newspaper. Would people appreciate the customization of the paper, or would they see it as an invasion of privacy?

Graffur• 5 years ago

I thought this was how it already worked..

marlowe221• 5 years ago

A non-Chrome browser is always a good idea.

kuu• 5 years ago

This is probably related to the "ban" of third party cookies [1] and most likely they just found a way without using cookies but other technologies - most likely biometric features + Chrome data in case you're using Chrome

[1] https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-third-party-cookies/

Edit: I did not have time to read it, but here is the paper and probably something like the algorithm they want to use: https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...

jefftk14• 5 years ago

Here's Chrome's technical page for Privacy Sandbox: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

The bit you're quoting sounds like the WSJ trying to describe https://github.com/WICG/floc. That depends on the browser choosing to support the API, yes.

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

mfer4• 5 years ago

This feels like some slight of hand targeting the current political and legal efforts looking into Google.

For example, if they aren't collecting information on you than how do they have enough information to create cohorts? Is it that they are deeming information processed on your local computer running their software something that isn't them collecting? This seems like a form of misdirection.

Without knowing the technical details (which one never knows with Google), it leave me the impression that they have moved some of their categorization software client side (Chrome, web workers, etc) and are saying that they aren't collecting the data in that case.

Is it Google using remote devices as edge devices to do a bunch of work they'd been doing server side?

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

So now you, and your intellectual soulmates (whom you haven't met yet) will be targettable as a group. Hmm

kyrra• 5 years ago

mirror: https://archive.is/iPM0A

jMyles3• 5 years ago

It's unfathomable that this has become such a complex ordeal, except insofar as that confusion has been a source of profitability for advertisers.

The first principles are exceedingly simple:

What I want: for small, insurgent, creative businesses who want to specifically get my attention to be able to do that through inexpensive, surgical messaging rather than mass advertising.

What I don't want: for middlemen (or anyone) to facilitate this using information I didn't intend to make public and can't verifiably stop my browser (and other tech) from shedding.

candiddevmike• 5 years ago

Suddenly Facebook becomes a more valuable company than Google. People willingly give Facebook all kinds of juicy data that they have no problem selling ads for. Unless there is some kind of heavy penalty for this behavior (that can't become a "cost of doing business" and passed onto other businesses), all of these changes will just make Facebook more profitable.

drxzcl• 5 years ago

Maybe, but the ads I get on Facebook are a horror show of not really interesting almost garbage offerings. For all the data they have, they do a piss poor job of presenting me with enticing opportunities.

I’ll take context/search relevant ads on google and Adsense every day.

rblatz• 5 years ago

Somehow Facebook got the idea that I would be into non alcoholic drink mixers. They showed me so many ads for this class of product that I would absolutely never buy. It was like half a year of those irrelevant ads. Facebook advertising is a dumpster fire from my perspective.

skinkestek3• 5 years ago

Seems we get different ads:

From 2006 until about last summer Google only served me useless ads.

Facebook on the other hand managed to pick a number of ads that were in fact interesting. I have bought through them a couple of times which is quite amazing given that I think I easily spend 100 times more on Google properties or web properties with Google ads.

sn_master4• 5 years ago

FB and Instagram are infested with dropshipping scams.

ghostbrainalpha• 5 years ago

What's a drop shipping scam? I googled but I still don't get.

TheRealDunkirk• 5 years ago

I remember a small story, decades ago, about a company/univeristy which was left holding the bag when the government cancelled their contract. They were constructing a lens system to go into a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. It was something like $15M. The implication was that the government had found something even better, and gone with that instead. If Google is publicly giving up on a particular, unpopular technology to buy some PR, I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes.

There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...

sn_master4• 5 years ago

That's true for the B1 bomber. During the presidential campaign, when Reagan complained about the jobs lost due to its cancellation, Carter arranged for security clearance for him to know about the F-117 and stealth technology which rendered the B1 obsolete. Later on, Reagan restarted the B1 production anyway.

marshmallow_122• 5 years ago

heavy bombers reached their ceiling, i think with the b-52. developing new bombers, as far as i can see, is a criminal waste of resources, post Cold War.

cturner• 5 years ago

There is some overlap, but the planes serve different purposes. The B1 is still in service.

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

Having a system that's almost as good but less offensive to some people (the Privacy Sandbox) seems like a reasonable enough justification to change tactics.

Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble.

insert_coin• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble.

Google cares on their own.

And current advertisers may not care but who knows what kind of technology they may come up with in the future where that data might be valuable, having extra data has never been a problem for google.

btown3• 5 years ago

Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir...

Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.

phkahler• 5 years ago

Would that method benefit from Googles existing people database? I'm thinking it would, and maybe disabling current tracking will kick the ladder out from potential competitors!

Still probably a step in the right direction.

josefx3• 5 years ago

that they are not giving people unique identifiers

How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?

darren_2• 5 years ago

Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are.

If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something.

This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on.

Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around?

(obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)

sjs382• 5 years ago

without having read the article due to paywall,

https://archive.vn/qlvcE

toxik2• 5 years ago

I think an important question with the FLOC stuff is sort of brushed aside.

So, you have millions of users, and you make it "k-anonymous", or "anonymous if you squint real good". Is it really possible to find k such that privacy is meaningfully preserved, given the heaps of other information you have?

Say I belong to some cohort, and you know my IP address. I think this would be enough to fingerprint me reliably, never mind OS version, browser, plugins, etc.

sandworm1018• 5 years ago

Even if they stay with cohorts, I assume people will be members of a variety of them.

New parent. Lives in Springfield. Works at a power plant. Drives a car. Owns house. Horrible credit rating. Married with 2+ kids. Voted in last election. Ex military. Ex astronaut. Once purchased an effective baldness cure. How many seemingly large cohorts does it take before you are really talking about one clearly identifiable person?

kens• 5 years ago

Am I the only person who prefers well-targeted ads? If I see a targeted ad for a power supply IC on a random website, sometimes that's interesting and useful. On the other hand, Twitter is terrible at targeting and the ads are just annoying. Half are ads for random "as-seen-on-TV" quality products and the other half inexplicably think I am an oncologist.

comboy• 5 years ago

Why is it compared to "random user grouping"? I'm probably misunderstanding something, because it doesn't seem hard to be few hundred percent more accurate than randomness.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

From what I've read on FLoC (not much so I may be wrong), wouldn't having anonymized ad-targeting be a good outcome? Google and websites still get their ad revenue, and we still get ad-supported products. I guess there's always the possibility of a badly-anonymized algorithm leaking data, but other than that it still seems like a step up from that invasion of privacy being a given, no? If I'm misinterpreting the jist of FLoC, let me know.

CarelessExpert5• 5 years ago

There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money.

I know this sounds laughable given how toothless regulators have been thus far, but let's not forget that a) fines under GDPR have been growing and are likely to continue to do so, with ad tech in a particularly awkward spot, and b) both the EU and US governments and regulators have started nosing around big tech on a variety of fronts, including privacy and antitrust concerns.

Given that, the cost-benefit analysis becomes pretty complicated. They may feel a shift to a scheme which lowers revenues while avoiding regulatory scrutiny now makes sense.

usrusr• 5 years ago

Or it could mean that they have data showing that all that tracker targeting isn't actually providing the value to advertisers that they claim it provides and want to move on before that becomes common knowledge.

I'd love to see my scenario be true, but I'm afraid that it's much less likely than yours.

shadowgovt• 5 years ago

Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...

My guess is that they smell a change in the regulatory wind (EU and possibly US as well) and anticipate that if they get out ahead of it, those regulations will serve as a competitive moat against other advertisers.

That, or their A/B testing has confirmed ad quality isn't remarkably improved over the combination of search-tuned ads, adsense topic ads tuned to the site the user is browsing, and display ads tuned by data the site owner vends to Google about the user to fine-tune ad selection for them. They have enough data to know one way or another, and if it turns out there's not enough value-add to justify retaining all that user browsing state, dropping collation and storage of it can free up room for dozens of new projects.

It's easy to forget that one of the major constraints on what Google can do, at their scale, is storage and processing; they're so big that from most people's vantage points, those resources seem limitless, but inside Google, they know exactly how much they aren't doing because the machines and networking they already own are already pushing petabytes of data around and are already near max peak capacity for their mission-critical applications. Sometimes, the cheapest way to get more space for a new bet or an existing mission-critical task is to just stop doing something else.

amelius2• 5 years ago

a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk.

In the future, you don't have to rely on serendipity to find money on the street. You just use a satellite to find it for you.

vmception2• 5 years ago

this legend is decades old actually

the US hegemony relies on a perception of omnipotence, so there will always be a lot of boisterous claims

ChristianGeek• 5 years ago

Some of us already use them to find Tupperware in the woods!

somedude895• 5 years ago

There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker

To be fair, Google's biggest money maker is their SEA, which doesn't rely on your behavioral data, since user intent is given through a search query.

babypuncher• 5 years ago

Google owns the operating system running on half of all Americans' phones (and an even larger share overseas). On top of that, Chrome OS is continuing to gain market share.

I think this is your answer right there.

notatoad2• 5 years ago

it's important to remember that google's goal isn't to track you, it's to make money. So finding something that works better isn't necessarily a better way to track you, just a better way to make money.

tracking, including the costs of collecting and storing all that data as well as the PR cost of people being creeped out by all that data you store, is expensive. Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that ads will be just as effective and just as revenue-generating if their tracking becomes a bit less granular.

visarga• 5 years ago

Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very)

I think the problem is not ad targeting, but ad inventory. They want to sell things we don't need, that's the real cause of the low efficiency.

They should better focus on things people actually need at the time of search.

0_____05• 5 years ago

not to rain on the parade here but reading the date on a dime puts you well into sub-milliarcsecond territory, well past what is possible to resolve with even a diffraction limited optical light telescope of any kind from space.

Bigger telescope systems can resolve smaller objects, but even if you were to yeet an enormous, optically perfect, 10m telescope into the very lowest earth orbit possible (not maintainable due to atmospheric drag) you would still be a couple orders of magnitude away from being able to read the date on a dime.

burnte• 5 years ago

I believe his intent, especially with the word "purportedly", was so infer that the proposed system had amazing abilities, less than it was intended to be a perfectly accurate description.

bb123• 5 years ago

What does"sub-milliarcsecond territory" mean? I know nothing of satellite tech.

KirillPanov• 5 years ago

even if you were to yeet an enormous, optically perfect, 10m telescope

10m is a tiny aperture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar

jedimastert2• 5 years ago

their biggest money maker

Correction: if you go by the profit reports from Alphabet, Google Display Ads is not their biggest money maker by a long shot. That's still Search Ads

ppod• 5 years ago

Point of information: that's a point of information.

laurent923• 5 years ago

Yep, third-party cookies must be very inefficient by now, as well as the js GA script that enables tracking. This is probably the first two things ad-blockers block.

Of course they move away from this, the must have brainstormed and tested new ways for years. OTOH, it is stunning that we’ve invented tech that is stable even when an ad-blocker interferes with the webpage, cookies, js, requests, etc. Try that with binaries! (which is probably where they plan to move the code)

oxfordmale• 5 years ago

It is known that personally yargeted advertisements are relatively ineffective compared to advertising targeted at a group. For example, advertising for luggage on a travel website tends to lead to higher click through rates rather than showing a personalised advertisement. Personalized ads often try to market products you just have bought.

otabdeveloper42• 5 years ago

(I've worked in adtech for over 15 years.)

Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just applied statistics. So statistically significant and unbiased sampling is what makes advertising work.

Highly-targeted and personalized ads are a crutch due to the fact that unbiased sampling is pretty much impossible on the internet. (There's a joke about this: "an online poll has shown that internet penetration has now reached 100 percent".)

Neither advertisers nor publishers actually want to collect high-resolution data, it's a huge cost with very little benefit.

danielrhodes2• 5 years ago

There are probably a few things going on:

* Google sees the writing on the wall: people are becoming more privacy conscious, but more importantly governments in many countries are making motions to suggest this sort of tracking could be regulated in the future. They need to stay ahead of the curve.

* The value of tracking people in this way may be less than everybody seems to think - not all data about a person's activities is equally monetizable. Just because you read an article about Julius Caesar and then looked at some clickbait article about Britney Spears doesn't mean an advertiser can sell you a chariot.

* Google in making the first move can create an advantage for itself in the market

* Much of Google's revenue comes from their own properties -- in the case of search, they are already well positioned to show you relevant ads because you have shown intent. No need for cookies there.

* Google has a dominant position with Chrome and the article suggests they want to do fingerprinting of a person's browsing behavior and put people into different cohorts without sending the raw data to Google. This is similar to how Apple does machine learning on device. If Google has exclusive access to these cohorts, they have a strong incentive to move to a cookie-less model because it puts other ad networks at a disadvantage.

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

It seems like you could get most of the benefits by just doing content aware adverts? Is the advert showing on a page about guitars? Show an advert about guitars and music accessories. We don't need that advert to follow us around for the next month.

It also completely eliminates the creep factor and conspiracies around adverts. "How did they know I was interested in this, are they listening to my phone?" goes away when its the same as the content you are looking at currently.

chiefalchemist• 5 years ago

Spot on. They're not going to abandon their core, their bread & butter, their monopoly without a new & improved Plan A.

Full disclosure: I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I get more skeptical (and fearful) with each page turn.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

cratermoon• 5 years ago

Do you know our Lord and Savior Unified ID? https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/what-the-te...

LdSGSgvupDV• 5 years ago

I think your last paragraph is the answer. Targeting ad with personal information is questionably profitable to me. I am almost not caught by the ads in websites but by some search results (google search first page) or article in forums like here or reddit or some people I followed. Maybe Google just find out they actually do not need such garbage personal information. I said garbage because lots of them are really caused by random events (sometimes you are interested in something. But after that period of time, you would not ever get in touch with it again) or fake information. And, the ecosystem to store these information is expensive.

oiirewr234324• 5 years ago

I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes.

Oh stop it with these conspiracies.

Google (like Facebook) has been pushed in this direction for ~2-3 years by changes in Safari to the point that Google has started preparing for this pro-actively

Why do you think Google hasn't complained like FB about the upcoming changes in ios ?

moksly• 5 years ago

In my completely anecdotal experience, Facebook has been far, far, better at targeted advertising than google.

Facebook seems to know what Kickstarter products I’ve backed, what specific miniature paints I like and seemingly which I’ve already bought. Possibly because a lot of my miniature hobby socialising takes place in messenger and on Instagram.

Google by contrast is so bad at advertising, that I often have to re-search on duck duck go to find a webshop that I can actually use post-brexit. Maybe because google knows I don’t speak Spanish, Italian and suck at German? But I mean, I still buy stuff from Spanish websites using the translate function in chrome, so, shouldn’t they know better?

Anyway, for me personal and anecdotal, it seems google is really bad at predicting what I want. I mean, even for content. The front page of YouTube is full of videos I’ve already seen...

jellicle• 5 years ago

They don't have to track you at the destination if they can track you at the source.

Everything you type into your Android search bar is part of your Google profile of you.

classified• 5 years ago

That has to mean they found a method that's even more invasive and more insidious. I'm curious to find out what it is. Will Zuck's face turn green with envy?

creaghpatr• 5 years ago

Paul Graham on Twitter "What this news tells me is that Google has found a way to target ads just as effectively without using this data."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1367118518592888834?s=20

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

This seems like a pretty poor take by pg. It ignores the years of friction over targeted ads that have been leading up to this change. Apple and Mozilla have also shifted strategies in this area.

It seems the right time for Google to pivot, if not a little too late.

Mauricebranagh• 5 years ago

Or if its less efficient it might increase ad spend - not to be to cynical

CarelessExpert5• 5 years ago

Honestly, is that bad?

I have no objection to targeted ads.

I have a multitude of objections to systematic privacy invasion for profit.

If they can somehow target ads while preserving my privacy, I'm all for it.

hedora4• 5 years ago

This proposal won’t protect your privacy. It just helps cement their monopoly and provides a better signal. Pg’s analysis is spot on.

Havoc• 5 years ago

Out of the goodness of their hearts no doubt

nerdjon2• 5 years ago

I am a little curious why Google did not just announce that they were getting behind the system that Mozilla and Apple started talking about a year or 2 ago? (Or at least that they were working with them on something)

Otherwise like many others this makes me think that Google is still doing something fishy here and I don't trust it.

Edit: For anyone curious what I am talking about https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

The systems could be identical down to the last byte, and Google would never join. Google is in no world going to hand over control of their prime revenue-generating stream to TWO of their arch-rivals.

nerdjon2• 5 years ago

What Mozilla and Apple announced was meant to be a standard that worked across all browsers (if accepted).

It is in Google's best interest that whatever system they use works regardless of browser.

Largely I agree but Google's relationship with Mozilla and Apple is a little more complicated than "arch-rivals".

Nagyman• 5 years ago

Maybe they see the writing on the wall and they are conceding that they don't _need_ website visit tracking at the individual level. Instead, just mapping individuals into _categories_ is sufficient for targeting.

They'll categorize websites (as they already do) and put you into that category, but forego tracking exactly which website/page put you there. The specific page is probably more granularity and privacy invading than they need to continue printing money. Think Netflix movie categorization; who cares which movie I watched put me into the Norwegian-Horror-Romance-Action category, as long as my preferences are known, targeting will continue working.

While it's great for debugging how someone got into a bucket, all that's really needed is the bucket, not the raindrop. I'm certain they'd like to continue knowing those buckets though, so getting ahead of that is critical to their business.

sagivo• 5 years ago

It's a good time to pivot. Google is one ad-block away from loosing 70% of their revenue [1]. They should adopt the model that DuckDuckGo uses [2] and offer ads based on search query vs user data tracking.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-g...

[2] https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

api2• 5 years ago

They should also offer a paid search engine with more advanced features and better results. I would pay for that if the cost were reasonable.

s3tz• 5 years ago

A drag and drop filter builder alone and I'd fork over a subscription.

kennyadam• 5 years ago

I pay for Google One and would love it if they included no ads in with that. I bet a lot more people would take it up too.

arcturus17• 5 years ago

You mean one where SEO-driven garbage content didn't flood the ten first pages of results? Isn't that a lost battle, ie, wouldn't the same guerilla army of SEO marketers who've driven things to where they are right now find ways to pollute that too?

rafaelturk3• 5 years ago

This is a good sign, however I can't read any actual concreate, real, effective, actions here..

blackbear_• 5 years ago

They are referring to the chromium privacy sandbox: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

rafaelturk3• 5 years ago

Yes.. something that Safari and Firefox are years ahead. My point is: From Title `Charting a course towards a more privacy-first web` expectation is for a real shift in Google policies and actions.

rafaelturk3• 5 years ago

`... we’ve been working with.. ` Emphasis in the `gerund` terms used and vague promisses made: We will be thinking about doing something..

samschooler• 5 years ago

I feel like the phrase “tracking individual people” is how Google is going to keep tracking you as well as they did before.

With the announcement of federated learning of cohorts [0], it allows Google to use their massive amount of information they have on you already, as well as their dominance in AI to cut out the easy way of tracking people, and make it harder for anyone else to personalize ads.

Don’t get me wrong it’s a good thing that we are removing third-party cookies, but the idea that Google is confident they can track you without them makes me worried for the future of advertising. This move is undoubtedly going to cement google as the best ad tracking company for some time into the future.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/24/google-extremely-confident-a...

VSerge• 5 years ago

With regards to the existing footprint of Google, it's useful to keep in mind that Google and Facebook combined are already catching 74% of advertising dollars spent online, as per the bloomberg article shared here today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325950

It's also worth noting that other groups have proposed systems that would not result in Google creating another monopolistic product line. Google did not seem very interested in such alternatives.

rektide2• 5 years ago

With the announcement of federated learning of cohorts [0], it allows Google to use their massive amount of information they have on you already, as well as their dominance in AI to cut out the easy way of tracking people, and make it harder for anyone else to personalize ads.

yes, yes yes yes. This proposal is that:

* the web have no individual tracking

* the browser, instead uploads our every activity across all sites into the cloud

* the cloud/browser-operators (google, firefox, microsoft, opera, brave) take these troves of big data & apply machine learning to generate cohorts

* the browser then places us into these cohorts

this would, as parent post suggested, absolutely "cement google as the best ad tracking company". it also makes it radically harder to create a new browser. Brave would have to become not just browsing software you run on your computer, but a cloud-service, gathering reams of data like Google, generating cohorts out new big data systems. how is Lynx/elinks supposed to become compliant with this new proposal? how is anyone other than the already existing giants of the world supposed to do this?

bold bold bold plan organize & own all the worlds data here. privacy on the web, but none in the web browser: brave new world Google. you madmen.

qyph• 5 years ago

In floc no personal data or web history is uploaded to the cloud. This is the essence of "federated learning" - your browser does the big ml computation, then just uploads the result.

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

Yeah what is the cohort size and how many cohorts can a person be part of? This sounds like an underhanded way Google can say they don't track individuals while in practice it is almost the same.

jefftk14• 5 years ago

what is the cohort size?

"The browser ensures that cohorts are well distributed, so that each represents thousands of people."

how many cohorts can a person be part of?

It's just:

    cohort = await document.interestCohort();

See https://github.com/WICG/floc

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)

krick• 5 years ago

Absolutely, and I'm not even sure it's a good thing that we are removing third-party cookies. I mean, if we take a step back: why should I even hate them? Yes, there are problems with them, there have been exploits using them and all that, but I'm pretty confident there will be similar problems with pretty much anything, because there's always a clever way to abuse some technology that was created with the best intentions in mind. And cookies, at least in theory, mean that you are putting me in charge of whatever tracking token you assigned to me: I can open my browser settings and clear it at any time. It's a good thing.

Of course, there are reasons why they aren't such a good thing as I make them sound to be. And the fact that you don't feel in charge of them should rather emphasize, than negate my point: if such a simple thing turns out to be something you learn to hate, don't you ever dream of something more complicated and less transparent to be your salvation.

And ever since federated learning became "the next big thing" I was arguing here on HN (rather unsuccessfully, I feel) that this doesn't mean that there's suddenly "no tracking", buying into that is just naïve. I'm not directly commenting on FLoC API, both because I don't know it well and because it's usually about making a stronger point anyway: that performing learning client-side and then submitting some sort of "depersonalized data" means better privacy and essentially is having your cake and eating it too. But I think it's just misleading to describe things this way. The idea that "sensitive data" is your document id, your name/surname and such is hopelessly outdated. In fact, it's funny that anyone even believes that, because if you are not a complete bureaucrat, it should be clear that you are not your name or some other sort of ID number, you are your behaviour. It's just that people are used to the idea, that Big Brother needs that simple ID number to keep you in line. But perhaps he doesn't anymore.

What I'm saying is essentially that sending "depersonalized data" is just obfuscating which personal & sensitive data is actually exchanged. And (again, not in the context of FLoC API, but more generally) it can be any data: I think we all remember funny stories how completely impartial GPT-3 learns someone's phone number and such.

So, this, and all of what you already said about the monopolization of people-tracking market.

jsonne• 5 years ago

Google isn't the only one doing this though. The Trade Desk and the wider programmatic industry seem to be somewhat pushing to unify around Unified ID 2.0 especially as they released it to the public. (Eg one company isn't the gatekeeper on the cookieless future for ad targeting.

nonpolitic• 5 years ago

Exactly this. It's Google saying "we don't need third party cookies to track people", and removing them just makes life harder for their competitors.

asdf333• 5 years ago

the threat of regulation can be a powerful thing.

Justsignedup2• 5 years ago

I think this is it. This response shows that if anything we need to hasten regulation proceedings.

haolez• 5 years ago

But then, governments will choose who the winners are (and will charge for this).

Justsignedup2• 5 years ago

So, a company who's literal business is tracking you is claiming privacy-first? I'll believe it when I see it.

dmitriid2• 5 years ago

"privacy-first" says the company which keeps releasing APIs developed by and for that same company and opposed by everyone else on privacy issues: https://webapicontroversy.com/

jefftk14• 5 years ago

Mozilla's disagreement about those APIs is primarily about security, not privacy. For example, here on WebUSB: "Because many USB devices are not designed to handle potentially-malicious interactions over the USB protocols and because those devices can have significant effects on the computer they're connected to, we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them or to explain properly to end users to obtain meaningful informed consent. It also poses risks that sites could use USB device identity or data stored on USB devices as tracking identifiers."

Similarly, for Web Bluetooth: "This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices."

My read of the disagreement is it it's about a core design trade-off: how important is it that a browser can do anything that an app can do? I think it's very important (https://www.jefftk.com/p/we-need-browsers-as-platforms) and I'm frustrated that Mozilla no longer does.

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

dmitriid2• 5 years ago

Mozilla's disagreement about those APIs is primarily about security, not privacy.

The better statement would be "security and privacy".

I think it's very important (https://www.jefftk.com/p/we-need-browsers-as-platforms) and I'm frustrated that Mozilla no longer does.

I'm frustrated Google brushes aside any security and privacy concerns and just charges ahead and unleashes them onto the world. Mozilla may still think that browser-as-a-platform is important. However, they are clearly not willing to sacrifice security and privacy of users to achieve that goal.

The only reason is that Google wants to own the web stack (see Ars Technica article I'm alluding to: [1]), and no objections to what they propose, and do, will stop them. Honestly, I'm surprised they still ask other browser vendors for their positions (see, e.g. [2]), as they clearly couldn't care less.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack...

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

xet7• 5 years ago

Unfortunately:

- Apple has been removing many PWA apps from their App Store.

- For Google login and Play Store, Google often has new requirements, like adding more info about privacy to PWA website without replying to questions about more details with robot like answers.

Because of those increasingly more strict requirements and always changing APIs, it seems that in future web is the platform, and not mobile apps.

jqpabc1233• 5 years ago

So one of the biggest privacy invaders on the planet is charting a course towards "privacy first"?

If you believe this, maybe you would like to buy a bridge?

drewcoo• 5 years ago

Oh no, no, no. It's "more privacy first." And that may not be "privacy first" at all.

jqpabc1233• 5 years ago

"Privacy first" is Google-speak meaning "the first thing we do is eliminate your privacy".

hobofan• 5 years ago

- Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it

- It also doesn't seem too unlikely, given more and more talk of the possibility that "targeted" ads don't actually work that much better than non-targeted ones, and Google are in the best position to verify that. Switching to ad models that are not based on exact user tracking, as long as they have the monopoly position might be the best way to ensure future profitability before they lose their users due to privacy concerns. All the AI and other technical and other monoplistic (AMP, Maps, etc.) advantages might be good enough to beat any tracking-based competitiors.

jqpabc1233• 5 years ago

... possibility that "targeted" ads don't actually work that much better than non-targeted ones

They don't and here is why --- if you search but don't purchase through a Google ad, you're likely to still see ads for the item following you all across the internet for months after you made a purchase elsewhere.

This does nothing but annoy the user.

domnomnom• 5 years ago

A lot of people work at google. A subset of googlers are very focused on privacy first.

supermatt3• 5 years ago

Id say the title is incorrect, as its still selling ads based on your browsing - its just they arent directly capturing the addresses - instead using some ML for cohort analysis via their "Privacy Sandbox".

It seems to me that this is actually giving them more reach, as now it wont just be websites using google analytics, etc - but EVERY website you visit, unless the site owner specifically opts out - a google-made blackbox that sees EVERY site you visit and labels you accordingly

Few questions for the knowledgeable:

  - Is it be possible to disable?
  - Will they be releasing the datasets for how these ML models are constructed?
  - Do sites in "incogito mode" contribute to analysis?

jefftk14• 5 years ago

See https://github.com/WICG/floc

Is it be possible to disable?

"A site should be able to declare that it does not want to be included in the user's list of sites for cohort calculation. This can be accomplished via a new interest-cohort permissions policy." For a per-user opt out, a browser extension could easily block it.

Will they be releasing the datasets for how these ML models are constructed?

"The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop a cohort based on the sites that an individual visits. The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors. The central idea is that these input features to the algorithm, including the web history, are kept local on the browser and are not uploaded elsewhere — the browser only exposes the generated cohort."

This code will be in the browser, which is open source.

Do sites in "incogito mode" contribute to analysis?

"All sites with publicly routable IP addresses that the user visits when not in incognito mode will be included in the POC cohort calculation."

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

supermatt3• 5 years ago

So to reiterate:

Is it be possible to disable?

No. You suggest this is possible with an extension, but it clearly wouldn't be permitted in chrome store (as per well known ad-blockers). Why wouldn't it be a setting in the browser? Clearly anti-user practices.

Will they be releasing the datasets for how these ML models are constructed?

No. You suggest that the code is in the browser (which i doubt - its certainly not at the moment!). Even if it were it is effectively useless without the training datasets. i.e. its a blackbox.

Do sites in "incogito mode" contribute to analysis?

No (at least this one is a positive "No") :)

CivBase• 5 years ago

"Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust"

That's quite the oxymoron of a title.

Regarding the article, it seems like Google is just doing the bare minimum to keep up with the rest of the industry when it comes to privacy. Every step they make comes shortly after others in the market have already taken a similar step[0]. Google is on top and they want to keep it that way. And they know they can so long as they keep pace just enough so as not to anger their users enough for them to switch away from the Google platforms they're comfortable with.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/02/23/latest-firefox-rele...

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.

Google is in a position where they don't need to track individuals across the web. Most people have become dependent on Google's products and services. Even third-party websites are often dependent on Google services which feed them data in one form or another (Google Analytics, Google Sign-In, ReCaptcha, Google Cloud, etc). If anything, this move is beneficial to Google because they only have to make a small sacrifice to handicap their competition.

throwaway3699• 5 years ago

That's quite the oxymoron of a title.

Not necessarily true if you've seen how much Google bends over backwards to protect privacy inside the company. Data is a liability, after all.

h0nd• 5 years ago

Sometime I dont get the full article, so here for those with the same issue:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.

The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators. Google’s heft means that its move is also likely to stoke a backlash from some competitors in the digital ad business, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads, measure their effectiveness and stop fraud. Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital-ad consultancy. “If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday. Google had already announced last year that it would remove the most widely used such tracking technology, called third-party cookies, in 2022. But now the company is saying it won’t build alternative tracking technologies, or use those being developed by other entities, to replace third-party cookies for its own ad-buying tools. Instead, Google says its ad-buying tools will use new technologies it has been developing with others in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple websites. One such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their own devices, and allows advertisers to target aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts,” rather than individual users. Google said in January that it plans to begin open testing of buying using that technology in the second quarter. Google’s abandonment of individualized tracking across multiple sites has the potential to reshape the industry, given the market power of its ad-buying tools. About 40% of the money that flows from advertisers to publishers on the open internet—meaning the part of digital advertising outside of closed systems such as Google Search, YouTube or Facebook —goes through Google’s ad-buying tools, according to Jounce. Google says its announcement on Wednesday doesn’t cover its ad tools and unique identifiers for mobile apps, just for websites. But its plan is the latest sign that the tide might be turning on user tracking more broadly. Related Video How Apple and Google Formed One of Tech’s Most Powerful Partnerships Skip Ad in 15 You may also like Created with sketchtool. Up NextCreated with sketchtool. Your browser does not support HTML5 video. Created with sketchtool. Created with sketchtool. 0:00 / 8:03Created with sketchtool.Created with sketchtool. 0:00 How Apple and Google Formed One of Tech’s Most Powerful Partnerships Apple and Google have one of Silicon Valley’s most famous rivalries, but behind the scenes they maintain a deal worth $8 billion to $12 billion a year according to a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit. Here’s how they came to depend on each other. Photo illustration: Jaden Urbi Apple Inc. is pursuing its own plans to limit tracking of app usage by requiring developers to get opt-in permission from users before collecting an advertising identifier for iPhones. At the same time, European Union privacy regulators have fielded multiple complaints about the information that websites share with third parties about what content users are viewing as part of such tracking. One set of complaints comes from Brave Software Inc., maker of a privacy-focused web browser, where Google’s Mr. Temkin was chief product officer until last summer. Google says Mr. Temkin’s involvement in its plan demonstrates its commitment to user privacy. Brave didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Google’s changes come as big tech companies face multiple antitrust investigations. Smaller digital-ad companies that use cross-site tracking have accused Apple and Google of using privacy as a pretext for changes that hurt competitors. And Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in January said in an earnings call that “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.” In the U.K., the Competition and Markets Authority, the country’s top antitrust regulator, last month opened a formal probe into Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. The probe stemmed from a complaint from a group of marketers that argued Google’s plan would cement the company’s heft in the online advertising space. A Google spokesman said the company has been briefing the U.K.’s CMA on its plan to end its own use of unique tracking across multiple websites. Google’s announcement complicates advertising-industry efforts to come up with an alternative, more privacy-friendly technology for targeting individual consumers, such as the one being led by the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a group of advertisers and advertising technology companies, that would rely on new identifiers, like strings of numbers and letters derived from users’ email addresses. Without mentioning the partnership’s effort directly, Mr. Temkin referred to identifiers “based on people’s email addresses” as examples of tools Google won’t use. Google acknowledged that other companies may push ahead with other ways to track users. Companies that use parts of Google’s advertising infrastructure, such as its ad exchange, could potentially still sell ads that use their own unique identifiers, Google said. But the company said it won’t use or invest in such tools for ads it sells. “We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not,” Mr. Temkin wrote in the blog post. “We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions.” There are exceptions to Google’s plan. The company’s limit on unique tracking identifiers doesn’t extend to so-called first-party data—information a company gets directly from a customer. For instance, websites will be able to sell ads based on users’ activity only on that specific site. It also means Google will continue to allow advertisers to aim ads on Google services like YouTube at specific clients for whom they already have contact information. But when the changes go into effect, Google will stop targeting such ads at those people when they are browsing other websites. Nestlé SA, a large advertiser that Google had briefed on the changes, said it welcomed the initiative on privacy grounds. “We have long since recognized and advocated for the importance of first-party data, and it’ll become even more vital in a privacy-first world,” said Aude Gandon, Nestle’s global chief marketing officer. Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com

helsinkiandrew• 5 years ago

Once they've done this I wonder how hard it would be for Google to make an Apple like "do you want this website to track you/share data with these websites?" popup in Chrome. To reduce the efficiency of Facebooks data capturing/targeting and profitability of their advertising?

Technically more challenging of course.

rossdavidh3• 5 years ago

Hypothesis: the real motivation is that Google has determined the following:

1) we can sell all our ads for just as much money anyway, even without targeting based on web browsing, because the advertisers will take what we let them get

2) targeting based on browsing history is more complicated, requiring more developers and server capacity, which Google could certainly afford but it has plenty of other things to do that pay off better

3) it turns out that advertising based on what website you are currently on, works just as well anyway; to put it another way, all that "show a person who just bought a car an ad for another car" targeting was not really working.

"We respect privacy" sounds better than "our targeting accomplished almost nothing and you'll buy the ads anyway."

MetaWhirledPeas• 5 years ago

to put it another way, all that "show a person who just bought a car an ad for another car" targeting was not really working.

Boy that sure is true for me and has been for a long time. I'm often bewildered not by how accurate my ads are, but rather by how braindead they seem to be. I'm not convinced algorithm-based ads work at all.

In fact I would hypothesize that ads are often more effective when they are unexpected, for something the viewer has never considered buying before. A targeted system would hide such ads.

rossdavidh3• 5 years ago

Excellent point which I had not considered before.

izacus2• 5 years ago

Well this is kinda obvious - and a good thing I guess? If Google can sell ads without tracking everyone, that seems like the best win? It protects our privacy and removes them from the fight for more tracking in pretty much the easiest way possible.

tehlike3• 5 years ago

Google doesn't work that way, and in general a corporation pretty much converges to a point where they will put resources on wherever there's dollar.

You are underestimating the big picture, which is - google is really left between apple and regulations (gdpr, ccpa etc) pushing privacy front and google have no choice but to go in this area.

rossdavidh3• 5 years ago

"...will put resources on wherever there's a dollar."

Yes, but it may be that they've decided there's no dollar here. Or, to put it another way, they get that dollar whether they track your browser history or not, so why bother? It's more like cutting corners, which corporations are most certainly willing to do, but in this case we like it (but that is probably only incidentally of interest to top executives).

mfer4• 5 years ago

Google has a long history of misdirection and slight of hand so this should be looked at through their history.

Would Google do something that causes them to make a lot less money? Likely not.

I wonder if Google is treating our computers as edge nodes running their software (i.e. chrome, js workers, etc). Because it's tracking us on our computers they don't consider it Google tracking us. Then they phone home with calculated cohorts and cohorts are always changing. It's still tracking us but in a different way.

mfer4• 5 years ago

If they aren't going to track us as individuals does this mean they will also not buy data on individuals?

herodotus• 5 years ago

...a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies.

Is this really the main culprit? I get the impression that a lot of the tracking work has to do with server side data gathering based on ip addresses, matching web sites, shared login data, embedded pixels and probably all sorts of other clues. I would love to be wrong about this.

If I am correct then "blocking third-party cookies" is mainly a feel-good marketing ploy.

superkuh2• 5 years ago

Privacy first, freedom a distant third or fourth. As everything becomes HTTPS only due to cargo-culting by people applying business practices outside of context the re-centralization of the web will be complete. A handful of single points of failure (the TLS cert authorities that everyone groups up in) will exist for governments/public to pressure, for accidents to happen, and for money to corrupt.

rakhodorkovsky• 5 years ago

Could you expand on your concerns? How should we go about addressing them?

superkuh2• 5 years ago

If you're the person deciding weather or not to serve HTTP+HTTPS or just HTTPS, chose to serve HTTP+HTTPS. When chosing a TLS cert authority, consider using sometime other than LetsEncrypt even though they're awesome. Everyone using them is not awesome.

b0tzzzzzzman• 5 years ago

I wonder how this will be a shield from the increasing Congressional probes on technology companies. I see how this will continue moving the narratives. Its hard to explain mainstream technical issues without damaging reductism.

Not looking forward to those discussions in the future.

throwaway3169432• 5 years ago

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

What’s difficult to conceive is how the currently bloated and monetization heavy internet could survive without advertising. An internet composed of relevant and useful information stored as light weight documents could easily (and used to) exist without advertising. Without ads we probably wouldn’t have millions of identical recipe sites with infuriating backstories, pop ups, share buttons, in-line promotions, etc. but we would still have people sharing their grandmother’s apple pie recipe on personal sites along with a few paid services that add real value instead of SEO garbage and social fluff.

oblio3• 5 years ago

What’s difficult to conceive is how the currently bloated and monetization heavy internet could survive without advertising.

The no-monetization web ship sailed circa 1995. The internet is about a lot of money and it will be about even more money. If it's not monetized through ads, it will be monetized in other ways (probably regular sales but most likely subscriptions).

folkrav2• 5 years ago

I'm still kind of surprised to see people think of the internet as this static information library it was originally thought as. It hasn't been this way for decades.

throwaway3169432• 5 years ago

I should have specified ad monetization or product placement, brand promotion and things in that vein. I’m not against commercializing of the internet but I am against the ad revenue model that heavily distorts the content and presentation. I don’t know what the winning model looks like, lots have been suggested like micropayments, subscriptions, donations, and others more far fetched but none of that can take root until we remove the toxic ad industry.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

It is also a flat out lie because the "information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people" is not funded by ads, ads fund google, which keeps a 70% cut for themselves. Information is basically impossible to monetize these days unless people charge. Google does not create information, it copies/steals it.

It is difficult to conceive Google without advertising as its economic foudnation.

tehlike3• 5 years ago

How did you come up with "google keeps 70% to themselves" fact?

Google revenue cut is around 30%, not the other way around.

op032• 5 years ago

Whats odd about the recipe story is my folks have accumulated quite a collection of cookbooks over the years, yet for mysterious reasons both prefer to endlessly scroll through the ad infested nightmare on every cooking site recommended by the Google app. Some of these sites have an Ad after every sentence.

eek04_3• 5 years ago

As somebody that has quite a few shelf-meters (shelf-yards) of cookbooks: If I'm looking for a specific recipe, it's still faster to go through the online recipes than getting out the cookbooks and going through the index and finding it. My phone is also more practical to lug around than a cookbook.

sawmurai• 5 years ago

Yes, nothing more frustrating than quickly looking up a recipe detail whilst in the middle of cooking it and having to scroll deep, deeep, deeeeep down the useless SEO text only to scroll past that one tiny detail. My wife and I are creating our own cooking book as a PWA. Only bullet points, no fluff. Short: useful.

dageshi• 5 years ago

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

folkrav2• 5 years ago

An internet composed of relevant and useful information stored as light weight documents could easily (and used to) exist without advertising.

Any concrete traffic measurements between those sites then and now? I'd be extremely surprised if traffic didn't shoot up by orders of magnitude.

That's also assuming that no ads means we'd go back to the mid-90s internet. Pretty sure there are still companies that would like to do business online, even without targeted ads. The tactics would change, that's it.

Without ads we probably wouldn’t have millions of identical recipe sites with infuriating backstories, pop ups, share buttons, in-line promotions, etc.

True for pop-ups, in-line promotions or ads. But SEO will be a thing as long as we have search engines. Hell, earlier search engines were getting gamed with keyword stacking all the damn time. Bringing you on the page and showing you ads wouldn't be enough to make money, but I don't see how you'd even get rid of sites wanting traffic. Unless you're really advocating for getting rid of commercially motivated sites - which I'll assume you're not, as it is kind of delusional, IMHO.

we would still have people sharing their grandmother’s apple pie recipe on personal sites along with a few paid services that add real value instead of SEO garbage and social fluff

That's a whole lot of extrapolation, and a rather subjective judgement call. Hell, one could definitely call this very site "social fluff".

pluc• 5 years ago

You know privacy is trendy when Google starts advocating it.

kogus• 5 years ago

This article is full of basic self-contradictions.

The very first sentence:

  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.

He literally describes Wikipedia, which is not based on advertising as its economic foundation.

Immediately after that, he says:

  72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being 
  tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% 
  say that the potential risks they face because of data collection
  outweigh the benefits

If that's true, then we are already far past the point where everyone just expects intrusive spying to be a normal part of web use. If that feeling were going to disrupt the advertising business, then it would already have done so. Therefore, his next comment is categorically false (though I wish it were true):

  If digital advertising doesn't evolve to address the growing
  concerns people have about their privacy and how their
  personal identity is being used, we risk the future of
  the free and open web.

I think another comment here by user samschooler nails it - Google wants to block intrusions by its competitors under the guise of protecting privacy, while opening up new doors to tracking that only it can take advantage of.

The right way to respect user privacy in advertising is much simpler: just use what they voluntarily gave you (i.e., the words in their search terms) to present relevant advertisements. That may not provide as great of a "benefit of relevant advertising", as he puts it, but that's fine with me.

getpost• 5 years ago

Even though Google is being investigated or sued in several jurisdictions regarding its data collection practices, I think this change is down to Apple. Google can fight governments using the legal system indefinitely, but Apple can and did just decide that better disclosures were required. YouTube was recently updated on the app store, but gmail etc have not been updated in months.

itsbits• 5 years ago

I see most of you guys are saying that Google is doing foulplay to be unicorn of advertising. Just wanted to understand what else current technologies can replace third-party cookies? Like third-party localStorage is possible?

beshrkayali3• 5 years ago

Google charting a course towards a privacy-first web is like the tobacco industry "charting a course" towards healthier people.

wazoox• 5 years ago

"Mr. Fox : charting a course towards a better coop."

Yeah, well. Not holding my breath on this one :)

yur3i__• 5 years ago

This may be my personal bias against google talking but I see the removal of third party cookies less as a privacy first move and more as a move to consolidate their monopoly on user data. If they can already identify people via the browser then they don't need cookies to do so like other organizations would.

EasyTiger_• 5 years ago

Find it difficult to believe anything they say.

salamander014• 5 years ago

I am biased to think this was going to be just a bunch of hoopla coming from Google. They are the last company I'd expect to actually care about user privacy.

"That’s why last year Chrome announced its intent to remove support for third-party cookies," aka only Google's cookies are "safe". Sounds like Google is going to try and block it's competitors from being able to gain the information Google uses to make money (tracking information for ad revenue.)

Also this was written like someone needed to fill in the article for a C-Level headline after the headline was already chosen. Disappointing that a company like this maintains it's stranglehold on a market and tool (now commodity) that regular people have no understanding of.

jefftk14• 5 years ago

remove support for third-party cookies," aka only Google's cookies are "safe"

If you are on a site, first-party cookies are cookies for that site and third-party cookies are cookies for any other site. It is "third-party" from the perspective of the site, not the perspective of the browser.

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

GeekyBear2• 5 years ago

I never thought I would mistrust Google as much as I already mistrust Facebook, but here we are.

You can target ads based on the content of the webpage they are displayed on instead of constantly spying on everyone.

How about we go back to that?

seaman19212• 5 years ago

sure, just drop everything and go back to 1999 :)

GeekyBear2• 5 years ago

Or adopt strict privacy laws.

choppaface• 5 years ago

Is this even possible? Won't their ML ad models still have seen data from when they DID track people across sites? And even if they stop using those models, won't the structure and tuning of those models have been derived from cross-site-tracked data? This sounds a lot like a computer vision company saying "we have stopped using imagenet in our model training!". Did you really re-train from scratch? Ok, even if you did, now did you also happen to re-derive your network architecture from your own data?

eternalny1• 5 years ago

This is not true, they say they are switching from third-party cookies to FLoC.

The EFF calls FLoC "bad for privacy". More information here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv...

cutenewt• 5 years ago

However, Google will still allow its advertising customers to target users across its range of services — from YouTube, to Gmail, and Search — if users are logged into their Google accounts, Digiday reported. The announcement also doesn't affect mobile apps and mobile-app trackers. Similarly, the announcement also doesn't prevent publishers from selling ads based on information about how a user behaved on their specific site.

Looks like Google can still target users who are signed in. From this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-to-stop-tracking-indi...

samizdis• 5 years ago

There's an archived, no-paywall, version here:

https://archive.is/qlvcE

ogre_codes4• 5 years ago

This is not a major change from their previous stance.

investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.

Fundamentally they are still tracking people and still using your information to sell you advertising. They are just relying on hardware you buy and your own software to do it.

One thing I've been curious about this whole time as they've been talking up "FLOC" is what they are doing with regards to other browsers. Are they simply giving up on the ability to track non Chrome users and rely on market share?

The other piece this doesn't mention is it very specifically says "Web Browsing", not tracking in general, for example across applications on mobile devices or via integration into Android.

hedora4• 5 years ago

I briefly hoped this meant they were giving up on ad targeting.

However, my reading of this is that they’ve given up on embedding trackers in websites, and instead will embed trackers at the operating system level, where they can gather even more information.

The stuff about cohorts describes standard clustering algorithms that have been used for ad targeting for decades.

This doesn’t sound like a win for privacy. It sounds like greenwashing of a massively expanded surveillance infrastructure.

happyconcepts• 5 years ago

Perhaps it's as simple as google was previously paid for access to that data by government(s) but now it's no longer lucrative.

beshrkayali3• 5 years ago

Why is this marked as a duplicate? What is it a duplicate of?

JadoJodo• 5 years ago

I think the kicker here is what this post is NOT titled: "Google to Stop _Showing_ Ads Based on Your Specific Web Browsing"

naebother• 5 years ago

Instead, Google says its ad-buying tools will use new technologies it has been developing with others in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple websites. One such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their own devices, and allows advertisers to target aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts,” rather than individual users.

Oh, turns out you're in a cohort of 1. Privacy sandboxed.

gumby• 5 years ago

I don't understand this prediction (emphasis mine):

Google’s heft means that its move is also likely to stoke a backlash from some competitors in the digital ad business, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads, measure their effectiveness and stop fraud.

Isn't this just an opportunity for these guys to differentiate themselves from the 900 lb gorilla? And if that tracking really leads to ads with higher conversion rates then those competitors will do better than Google (until, if those ads really are better, the latter reverses its decision).

BTW this is not in any way a defense of intrusive tracking, which I consider both a tragedy and a significant waste of money. My intuition is that this tracking adds little to no benefit. I suspect we're still in the at least "50% of advertising spend is wasted"* world; more like 70%-80%. This is another nut to be cracked, and one unlikely to be addressed by any incumbent.

* Attributed to John Wanamaker (among others, though I feel he is the most likely source)

sandworm1018• 5 years ago

>Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites > to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple websites

Key words:

Individual: They might still track persons by group, by placing people into pools of like-minded internet users and track the browsing trends of this group.

Browsing: Geographic location, sleep cycles, or media streaming/viewing preferences are still on the table.

Multiple: Tracking within one website is still a thing. YouTube habits are still a go.

Websites: Apps, and everything we do with them, are not "websites".

While I think this is a step in the right direction, I don't see this statement as very limiting. It only addresses a very narrow type of tracking.

sbarre• 5 years ago

Yeah at which point does their sub-grouping effectively reduce us back down to identifiable individuals in everything but name?

manigandham• 5 years ago

1) Google is switching to cohort-based analysis rather than individual data. It's not a complete shut off.

2) Google already has plenty of 1st-party data from search, gmail, maps, news, etc which is more than enough to sustain the same targeting abilities.

srhngpr• 5 years ago

The Axios version [0] of this is so much more palatable, to the point and not behind a paywall. Can we maybe consider swapping to this instead?

https://www.axios.com/google-goodbye-individual-user-trackin...

crazypython• 5 years ago

In that case, will Google remove the "X-Client-Data" identifier, which is sent every time you visit any third-party site that uses any google resource, such as Google Fonts, Google Analytics, or DoubleClick? I doubt so. They and by extension the government will still track your specific web browsing– as in the title, they just won't sell ads based on it.

stiray• 5 years ago

This is actually quite simple.

If google analytics, recaptcha, tag manager,... are going to the graveyard or they becomes payable, there is something to it. If it stays, the google statement is a blatant lie.

prima-facie• 5 years ago

This is in line with Google announcing the availability of icon fonts today. Five years too late and everyone else is already doing it.

passivate• 5 years ago

Will there come a time when an OS ships with a built-in ad-blocker, similar to a built-in firewall, but for privacy?

kall• 5 years ago

I mean "Prevent Cross Site Tracking" is enabled by default in Safari. It doesn't block the display of ads, but it's basically a real tracker blocker like ghostery.

voisin• 5 years ago

Will Facebook follow suit now, or continue to whine about Apple’s impact to small businesses?

beshrkayali3• 5 years ago

The other post (which was strangely marked as a duplicate of this) was towards https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir....

sly010• 5 years ago

It looks like a paywall just prevented me from reading an article about the end of advertising as we know it⸮

feralimal4• 5 years ago

'cos it would be too creepy if they did!

dang3• 5 years ago

Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a different quality of conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

feralimal4• 5 years ago

How dare you! My comment, I felt, cut to the nub of what is going on!

Google is scrapping information from you from your phone, your browser, your emails, your searches. They track you at scale. They track millions of people at scale! Using all that data + data mining + their AI capabilities + psychologists, they are able to generate incredibly detailed models of each individual. Their models will have predictive power. And that is what their whole business is about - how to best monetise you for their customers and shareholders. (Of course Apple, Facebook, Amazon etc are trying to do the same.)

So, think about it, they have all this information, and will continue to collect it, but won't give you an indication on what they are collecting - why would they do that? Its because we are reaching a data equivalent of the uncanny valley - where google (et al) know you better than you know yourself, but don't want you to know that!

vishnumohandas• 5 years ago

Stop "personalizing" my "experiences" and you’ll have my trust.

ineedasername2• 5 years ago

I can't imagine that they're willingly giving up piles of money. Assuming they aren't, that may mean that individual tracking & targeting simply didn't add much value in attracting customers and sales.

Or they've but up such a massive database of individual behavior that they can now generalize that to targeted groups instead of individuals.

The article also just says they won't sell ads or invest in that technology, not that they won't still track and use the data in some other ways. They've probably invested plenty already to not need to push it further.

ipsum2• 5 years ago

that may mean that individual tracking & targeting simply didn't add much value in attracting customers and sales.

No, personalized advertising is the key to Google's ad success.

The main reason Google is doing this is to cement their ad monopoly. They have all the data now, when they turn off 3rd party cookies, no one will be able to compete with them.

ineedasername2• 5 years ago

Yeah, sort of what I meant by my last bit... They simply don't need it any more.

Razengan• 5 years ago

For all the hullabaloo about the Emperor’s new pErSoNaLiZeD ads, I have yet to see one about a video game or movie or book that I loved and didn’t discover through chance or word of mouth.

Meanwhile if I search for a coffin even once Amazon keeps recommending more to me. Way to go ya boffins.

@People working in the ad/tracking racket: Please, instead of trying to guess who I am or what I like, why not just let me TELL you?

Let me provide some criteria (“pixel art”, “chiptune music”) and feed you some examples (Fez, MegaMan) and try to show me similar games. Then I might actually spend some money because of an ad for once.

varispeed• 5 years ago

There should be a distinction between advertisement and manipulation of consumers into buying something they don't want or need. I think advertisement based on targeting should be severely regulated and restricted.

gallamine• 5 years ago

One set of complaints comes from Brave Software Inc., maker of a privacy-focused web browser, where Google’s Mr. Temkin was chief product officer until last summer.
David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.

Hey David, if you're on here, how many millions did Google give you to switch?

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I suspect the entire "show users ads based on their browsing history" simply doesn't work. I don't recall ever being interested in any of the ads targeted at me.

What works for me is, I buy "Mopar Action" magazine for the ads. Back in the day I bought computer mags for the ads. And so on. Those ads were targeted at what I was actually interested in at the moment.

For another example, recently I've become interested in Film Noir movies. I go looking for them, and I get ads based on my interests last month. No sale. I look at Film Noir websites, and I want to see Film Noir movie ads, not movies I was interested in months ago. If I look at a woodworking web page, I want to see ads for woodworking tools.

On my own web pages on programming, I wish Google and Amazon would run ads based on the page content. Amazon has a way to suggest that, and I tried it out. All it would serve for weeks was Batman movie ads. Why would anyone looking at a programming page want to see Batman movie ads? I finally just disabled the Amazon ads. It's similar with Google ads.

Note that serving relevant ads in this manner has absolutely no requirement to know my browsing history.

P.S. I actually still run Amazon ads on my programming pages. However, I don't let Amazon pick the product anymore. I pick it myself, and my page generation program picks one of those products for each page. The products I pick are from a self-curated list of the best programming books available.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

That sounds good, but why not just stop now or in a few months? If they stop next year, that could possibly be 20 months away.

_cs2017_• 5 years ago

The best ads I got were on Facebook, and based on something to do with my history, although in what way exactly, I cannot be sure. I got an ad about Triplebyte (got numerous job offers from that); ads for concerts that I was interested in; and ads for art exhibitions very specifically related to my interests (which I would have 100% missed if not for the ad).

So I'm super disappointed that I will not be getting such ads from Google. In fact, it annoys the hell out of me that people who are concerned about privacy created such a strong anti-ad-personalization movement. This harms people like me who prioritize getting valuable information over privacy. I think people should be allowed to enable their own privacy settings, but activists and politicians should not force their ideology on the society to such an extent as to scare corporations away from personalization.

Though to be fair, I don't recall a single useful ad from Google in my life. So maybe I overestimate the damage the privacy advocates are causing.

feint• 5 years ago

Half the top pages on Google are now AMP links - which are hosted on Google. So no Google doesn't need to track you across websites because you never leave Google.

ajarmst• 5 years ago

Isn't the ability to sell targeted advertisements pretty much the foundation of their business plan? The business plan they showed investors and stockholders? Maybe they'll stop indexing my behaviour against my name or social security number, but to stop tracking me or using that information is the kind of behaviour that leads to class action suits by shareholders. I suspect that this lede will only be true if one allows some pretty creative definitions of "stop", "selling", and above all "specific". The only purpose that adjective has in this sentence appears to be to grant that sort of flexibility. "Oh, no, we're not tracking that specific human being. We're only tracking the use of the computer he's sitting in front of."

colechristensen• 5 years ago

It seems like they're claiming to stop one particular kind of tracking, not targeting advertising all together. More than likely as a step to avoid regulation or to appear to be practicing good faith.

Or web browsing patterns turned out to be low-signal for ad delivery.

eevilspock• 5 years ago

Apple 1, Google 0

devops000• 5 years ago

So, now only Google can track users on internet because it owns the browser?

statstutor• 5 years ago

It seems like Google is aiming for regulatory capture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

While Google can now expect inevitable regulation, shaping that regulation in their interest will still benefit them by excluding new competitors (for example, by forming it so that execution depends heavily on trade secret and/or patented algorithms).

Simplicitas• 5 years ago

Is this, Ok we don't care about DATA, but we'll still track your METADATA, which is what really counts?

proxyforce• 5 years ago

“The Times They Are A-Changin'.” These types of moves from Google are interesting, while not unexpected given the mounting regulatory pressure they are facing. It’s a bit unclear which stake-holder Google is trying to optimize for: Chrome users, AdSense publishers, or itself. Time will tell how this all shakes out, but it’s important for people to realize that there are a growing number of alternatives available if you care about privacy and retaining control over your browsing activity. Neeva is a good example of an alternative search engine which prioritizes user privacy by following a subscription monetization model, avoiding the ad-ecosystem all together.

Disclaimer: I work at Neeva[1], and these opinions are my own.

[1] https://www.neeva.com

cybert00th• 5 years ago

The day Google stops selling ads based on your specific web browsing, is the day pigs will fly.

I agree with others, they've found another way to track us

Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing

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