I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.
Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.
Not sure how Chrome’s alternatives for providing relevant ads are harder to block when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it’s collected) in the settings. These systems are what Chrome is able to do at the moment to work towards blocking third party cookies. They do have an incentive to make something that they know works well for them though, I’ll give you that.
As a relative layman I also have the same question. If you can turn it off, what makes it so bad?
I’m not saying I trust Google, of course. It just seems like they have a vested interest in screwing over third party advertisers and making them more dependent on Google. If you can then disable the Google part, isn’t it a net benefit?
(I don’t use chrome and am not familiar with this change, so I may be missing something)
Strictly speaking, it’s an improvement over the current situation where you are tracked across the web to come up with a profile of your interests which is then used to deliver targeted advertising. The interest-based advertising is the end goal, it’s where Google makes its money. Google doesn’t necessarily need your data or to track you across the web to do that. I think people are unhappy that it doesn’t go far enough and just want either no targeted advertising or no advertising at all. Removing the ability to target ads would result in more ads being needed to make up for lower quality placements, which I believe would lead to increased ad blocker usage and an advertising death spiral. News sites are already almost practically unusable on mobile without blocking ads for example. Having no advertising means getting revenue another way such as paywalls and subscriptions.
With the Topics API, your browser will keep track of your history and provide sites with a limited number of topics (1 per week). Instead of being an opaque system on an ad provider’s server, you can examine and modify the topics being used in your browser or even look at the source code of the feature in the browser itself. With the Protected Audience API, the ad bidding process can occur in the browser as well instead of on a remote server. These features can be turned off.
There is definitely some concern that they’re screwing over third-party advertisers which is why their pages come with stuff like:
subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)
Regardless, Chrome ditching third-party cookies means that websites can no longer rely on them and must adapt their sites to function without them. This will mean that Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection should work better and they can remove third-party cookies in the future instead of having to create workarounds.
I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.
Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.
You’re telling me Firefox is the better browser?! Well colour me surprised.
exactly.
Not sure how Chrome’s alternatives for providing relevant ads are harder to block when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it’s collected) in the settings. These systems are what Chrome is able to do at the moment to work towards blocking third party cookies. They do have an incentive to make something that they know works well for them though, I’ll give you that.
As a relative layman I also have the same question. If you can turn it off, what makes it so bad?
I’m not saying I trust Google, of course. It just seems like they have a vested interest in screwing over third party advertisers and making them more dependent on Google. If you can then disable the Google part, isn’t it a net benefit?
(I don’t use chrome and am not familiar with this change, so I may be missing something)
Strictly speaking, it’s an improvement over the current situation where you are tracked across the web to come up with a profile of your interests which is then used to deliver targeted advertising. The interest-based advertising is the end goal, it’s where Google makes its money. Google doesn’t necessarily need your data or to track you across the web to do that. I think people are unhappy that it doesn’t go far enough and just want either no targeted advertising or no advertising at all. Removing the ability to target ads would result in more ads being needed to make up for lower quality placements, which I believe would lead to increased ad blocker usage and an advertising death spiral. News sites are already almost practically unusable on mobile without blocking ads for example. Having no advertising means getting revenue another way such as paywalls and subscriptions.
With the Topics API, your browser will keep track of your history and provide sites with a limited number of topics (1 per week). Instead of being an opaque system on an ad provider’s server, you can examine and modify the topics being used in your browser or even look at the source code of the feature in the browser itself. With the Protected Audience API, the ad bidding process can occur in the browser as well instead of on a remote server. These features can be turned off.
There is definitely some concern that they’re screwing over third-party advertisers which is why their pages come with stuff like:
Regardless, Chrome ditching third-party cookies means that websites can no longer rely on them and must adapt their sites to function without them. This will mean that Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection should work better and they can remove third-party cookies in the future instead of having to create workarounds.