Page 83 - IBT August 2021 Issue

Techonomist Take
By Maimun Mustafa
USERS VS
ADVERTISERS
Google Privacy Policy Rolled Back?
Earlier this year, Google
Chrome announced its
intent to remove support for
third-party cookies by early
2022. However, the
company took a major
U-turn on this decision and
has delayed the
implementation by almost 2
years. In the data privacy
war between Users and
Advertisers, who has
Google’s Privacy Policy
sided with?
Trail of Cookie Crumbs
To comprehend the importance of the
debate, it’s vital to understand what
cookies and tracking mechanisms are
in the first place. Third-party tracking
cookies are those incognito spies
present in your devices that follow you
and report back to advertisers. It’s
essentially the technology that the
worldwide targeted ad industry is built
on. This hidden tracking on your
phones, tablets and completely records
your browsing and transactions and
August 2021
very specific identifier for profiling user
behavior and essentially matching it to
their activity on other sites that know it.
Browsers do not block first-party cookies.
These are set by the operator of the
website the user is visiting or advertisers
contributing ads. First-party cookies assist
with activities like remembering what's in
your e-commerce shopping cart or keeping
you logged in for follow-up visits. One ad
tech workaround for third-party cookie
blocking, though, is to tie in with websites
to use their first-party privileges.
Playing the Privacy Card
In 2020, Google said it would block the
world's most widely used browser,
Chrome, from accepting the snippets of
text called third-party cookies. For
instance, this alteration would prevent an
advertiser that recorded your visit to a
gym website from subsequently showing
you ads for exercise instruments on other
sites that you browse. In March of this
year this policy was announced to be
rolled in early 2022 with two major
Additional safeguards to ensure Android
implications:
apps cannot track users who have opted
out of sharing their "Advertising ID."
To provide users with more control over
their data.
The search monarch already allows
Android users to limit ad tracking and
also reset their Advertising IDs. However,
developers can easily circumvent the
current restrictions with the assistance of
other device identifiers. Under the new
policy, developers would have only
received "a string of zeros instead of the
identifier."
helps advertisers, publishers and data
brokers profile you to help advertisers
target ads toward you. Your identity is
“fingerprinted” by humungous
databases and that data is reaped by
billion-dollar algorithms, and can
influence interactions, purchases,
voting patterns and your thought
process.
Technical Tenacity
Websites also are shifting to other
tracking methods like requiring logins
for free content. That delivers them a
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FLOCing towards Greater Privacy
Moreover, to eventually phasing out third-party cookies,
Google had started working on a technology called federated
learning of cohorts, or FLOC, that pairs ads to large groups of
people, rather than individuals. With FLOC, the browser
monitors the user's browsing history and groups the user with
others with similar behavior into a cohort with a unique
cohort ID. The idea is to present those IDs to websites and
advertisers, undistinguishable individual users while enabling
group targeting. Advertisers can then promote ads to the
cohort upon noticing that a particular group is visiting a type
of website.
The Way the Cookie Didn’t Crumble
In light of all the promise of FLOC in Google’s Privacy Policy,
the trillion-dollar company recently declared that it has
delayed the major privacy change to its Chrome browser by
pushing back the plan to block third-party cookies until late
2023 while it conjectures how to safeguard users whilst
providing web advertisers to continue their existing revenue
streams. The likely timeline to “phase out third-party cookies
[is] a three-month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in
late 2023.”
Chrome Engineering Director Vinay Goel announced in a blog
post, "We need to move at a responsible pace, allowing
sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions and
services. This is important to avoid jeopardizing the business
for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their
models of many web publishers which support freely available
content."
The internet giant said it had postponed the transformation as
part of a collection of adjustments to what Google calls its
Privacy Sandbox, to chart a better course for advertisers and
everyone else on the web. FLOC was the first venture under
Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative. In an update, the
company stated, “The Privacy Sandbox will provide the best
privacy protections for everyone. By ensuring that the
ecosystem can support their businesses without tracking
individuals across the web, we can ensure that free access to
content continues... We must take time to evaluate the new
technologies, gather feedback and iterate to ensure they meet
our goals for both privacy and performance.”
Nevertheless, Chrome’s competitor Brave cautions that
“Privacy Sandbox is designed to serve advertisers as much as
possible, with the hope that users will tolerate it, or not notice.
This is antithetical to how privacy software should be
designed, and incompatible with a user-focused web.”
In a Forbes article, researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj
Bakry state: “Google’s Privacy Sandbox blogs highlight that
third-party cookies undermine user privacy, yet they’re allowed
by default in Chrome. A more privacy-preserving approach
would be to make third-party cookies opt-in immediately
instead of waiting for a replacement, such as FLOC, to
materialize.”
Into the Pressure Cooker
It’s startling to know that Google made this
announcement roughly a month after Apple
introduced "App Tracking Transparency" with
its iOS 14.5 update with their Privacy above
all messaging kept steadfast.
Moreover, FLOC is Google's answer to a
Google created issue. The U.K.’s Competition
and Markets Authority (CMA) is presently
inspecting “whether [FLOC] could compel
advertising spend to become even more
concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the
expense of its competitors,” and a similar
inspection is examining into whether “Google
has made it harder for rival online
advertising services to compete.”
Additionally, the deferment comes amid
fix the internet's privacy problem. Legislation
greater pressure on Silicon Valley giants to
such as Europe's GDPR and the California
Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) target the data
collection that Google and other companies
desire for better targeting the advertisements
they deliver. The ad tech industry doesn't
have forever to change course because any
particular entity is dissatisfied.
Murkier Waters
The broader issue though is the unrealistic
one to resolve. FLOC works in isolation, in
theory. If the site genuinely only discloses
your cohort ID, then that could disguise you
anonymously. Nevertheless, in reality, the
website and the data brokers and trackers
sitting behind it have other data points too.
The user IP address, the identifiers associated
with the browser and Operating System,
clearly any information you give to the site or
that it holds on you as a customer or
registered user.
This increases the risk of users being
fingerprinted worse, not improved. The cohort
ID might present new data that would
otherwise not have been available. And you
can bet the data industry will find
workarounds, new techniques to factor FLOC
into its harvesting schemes, ensuring that
the targeted ad gravy train continues to roll.
Google’s Game Plan
We know Chrome dominates the browser market, with an
overwhelming 60-70% market share. Most of its revenues come
from selling access to you and your data, targeting you with
ads; not from apps or services. Chrome also harvests much
more of your data than other browsers
First-party cookies also are a precarious issue for Google. Its
own giant websites like search and YouTube let it set
first-party cookies. Google’s expansive online advertising
business can benefit from Google's cookies and tracking
information. Other advertising companies don't have that
privileged status.
As such, Google does admit the problem is out of hand. This
“proliferation” of mined user data, it said back in March, has
“led to an erosion of trust... 72% of people feel that almost all
of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers,
technology firms or others, and 81% say the potential risks
from data collection outweigh the benefits.”
One angle of Google's justification for pushing back its plan is
that moving too fast will encourage tracking companies to use
craftier tracking methods than cookies like fingerprinting.
Google believes blocking third-party cookies at this stage is
actually bad for people using the web because it drives
tracking companies to covert approaches such as
mentioned, "Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their
fingerprinting. In a statement to CNET Chrome Director Goel
fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information
is collected or used. We don't think that's a sustainable long
term investment,".
The question still persists: will this problem ever be resolved?
Tracking is just part of Chrome’s problem. Google is a data
business, struggling with many of the same issues plaguing
Facebook as users become more aware of their privacy and
until it can fuel that business model with data in such a way
personal data. Google’s business model relies on data and
that doesn’t compromise the user, it simply won’t be feasible.
Users Exposed
As it stands, the 2.6 billion Chrome users are exposed to a
serious privacy Catch-22. You can keep using Chrome—aware
that you’re being tracked—in the anticipation that Google will
resolve this issue at least two years later. Browser extensions
like Ghostery, DuckDuckGo, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin,
are designed to block trackers. By contrast, all top rivals of
Chrome, including Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft's
Edge and Brave Software's Brave, take more assertive
measures at preventing tracking as opposed to Google.
However, the current battle with Chrome’s privacy policy has
been won by the advertisers. If the user chooses to stand on
the side of privacy they know it’s time to shift browser
allegiances.
The Writer is the CEO of MCFG and the Executive Director of Global Chamber ©
Dhaka. He can be reached at maimun@globalchamber.org