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> You mentioned in the paper that Google is going to be blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, which is the biggest browser in the world. This has

> You mentioned in the paper that Google is going to be blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, which is the biggest browser in the world. This has been presented as a victory for privacy, but you suggest actually it’s another way for Google to shut out other people who want to do digital advertising. I find it interesting that the HN crowd loved that Apple was blocking 3rd party cookies in Safari but now that Chrome is about to do the same suddenly it's evil. If it is evil then it was evil even when Apple started doing it. If it's good that Apple did it then it's good that Google is following. The article basically argues it's evil and both Google and Apple should stop blocking 3rd party cookies because having 3rd party cookies provides opportunity for more competition > We need to explain that the information about you can be passed among 25 different ad tech companies or it can be passed among 25 parts of Google. Which one of those is better or safer? That’s hard to know. I know which one of them is cheaper—the one where there’s competition. And it’s also better for consumers in the sense of stimulating the content that they want to consume on the internet.

greggman3 6y ago
It would seem to be blocking 3rd party cookies is good and it's a net negative for Google because their analytics stop working. The article suggests google has more data than their competitors so it's a net positive to them. That might be true for small competitors. It's not true for big ones like Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft or possibly even Apple who have or potentially have a similar amount of info on you via the services they offer
- josefx 6y ago
  as far as i remember chrome actually sends an additional and probably unique xclient-data property when it connects to google owned addresses. This is a feature its competitors do not have access to.
  - chipperyman573 6y ago
    I just looked through the headers of a request to google.com, expecting this to be wrong, but it does look like this is there! Right at the bottom, x-client-data. The value ends with == which makes me think it's some kind of hash. Crazy. It does not exist when I use ungoogled chromium, firefox, or even edge.
    - drivebycomment 6y ago
      I looked it up just now and found: https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-data-tracking/ https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-dat...
uoaei 6y ago
> I find it interesting that the HN crowd loved that Apple was blocking 3rd party cookies in Safari but now that Chrome is about to do the same suddenly it's evil. Apple isn't an advertising company. Google is. The label of 'evil' doesn't need to be part of a conversation about anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior.
- idontevenknow1 6y ago
  https://searchads.apple.com/ https://searchads.apple.com/ Apple is an advertising company. Google sells android phones and gsuite, as well.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > Apple is an advertising company. Primarily, it's a hardware company. Lots of companies have advertising services, this does not make them "advertising companies". If your advertising products disappear and the company would function more or less the same, that's not the primary product in your company's portfolio. Google would be crippled, as advertising is the primary product (fed by data from all the other services it offers, often at a loss). Similarly, most of apple software would be useless if they lost control of their hardware production/control.
    - idontevenknow1 6y ago
      Depends on your definition of advertising-company. If you sell eyeballs through ads that means you are an advertising company.
      - typenil 6y ago
        This is an article about monopolies - which are all about scale and market dominance. Yet you've excluded both from your analysis. It doesn't seem to be a good faith argument.
        idontevenknow1 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 6y ago
Google's motto was and is (they remove it and put it back various time) "Do No Evil." They were the tech darling who innovated and created great tech products/services and all behind this mantra. We have since seen here on Hacker News the evil they do... i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 being one example of many. They get so much flack because they chose to have and promote that mantra then failed miserably in front of all here, many whom they inspired to get into tech and strive to work for them. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to work there!
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Why only block third party cookies? Block all cookies by default. If the user needs a cookie she can enable them. For example, on a per-site basis. Default setting is cookies on for all sites.
- thayne 6y ago
  Because that would be a terrible experience for consumers. Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to? Or whenever you want to use a shopping-cart? Do you want every site you ever go to to have a huge popup instructing you on how to enable cookies for the site? Not to mention how difficult this will make life for developers who use cookies for legitimate purposes.
  - harry8 6y ago
    > Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to? Yes! Absolutely. Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no But only when you explicitly make the request to use a cart or press the login button. Silently block everything else. There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies. And I use chrome for them. I use firefox with all that crap disabled for everything else. Give it a try!
    - thayne 6y ago
      > Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no I don't see how you could implement that without sites abusing any click event to try and get you to enable cookies. > There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies Good for you. Most people need more than that.
      - harry8 6y ago
        What as many as 10? 15? Or even 50! Now count your cookies. Orders of magnitude different. Thanks Google! Nobody agreed to that. Literally nobody.
probably_wrong 6y ago
I got a different interpretation from that paragraph than what you suggest. The interview doesn't state that 3rd party cookies are good. Rather, they argue that they are required to have a "healthy" targeted ads market: > So the question then is, what do consumers want? Do they want no targeted advertising? Well, then you can’t have an ad tech industry. Do they want targeted advertising that benefits the business that’s sending it, like the dog walker or the New York Times? That would require competition in the ad tech market. Of course, that conclusion rests on the assumption that "we" want a targeted ad market, an assumption that many here will dispute. But that's not the point of the lawsuit - their point is rather "Since this market exists, then the people must want it. And since people want it, we need to ensure that there's enough competition". "This class of business shouldn't exist" is not within the scope of this particular case.

greggman3 6y ago

It would seem to be blocking 3rd party cookies is good and it's a net negative for Google because their analytics stop working. The article suggests google has more data than their competitors so it's a net positive to them. That might be true for small competitors. It's not true for big ones like Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft or possibly even Apple who have or potentially have a similar amount of info on you via the services they offer

josefx 6y ago
as far as i remember chrome actually sends an additional and probably unique xclient-data property when it connects to google owned addresses. This is a feature its competitors do not have access to.
- chipperyman573 6y ago
  I just looked through the headers of a request to google.com, expecting this to be wrong, but it does look like this is there! Right at the bottom, x-client-data. The value ends with == which makes me think it's some kind of hash. Crazy. It does not exist when I use ungoogled chromium, firefox, or even edge.
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    I looked it up just now and found: https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-data-tracking/ https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-dat...

uoaei 6y ago

> I find it interesting that the HN crowd loved that Apple was blocking 3rd party cookies in Safari but now that Chrome is about to do the same suddenly it's evil. Apple isn't an advertising company. Google is. The label of 'evil' doesn't need to be part of a conversation about anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior.

idontevenknow1 6y ago
https://searchads.apple.com/ https://searchads.apple.com/ Apple is an advertising company. Google sells android phones and gsuite, as well.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > Apple is an advertising company. Primarily, it's a hardware company. Lots of companies have advertising services, this does not make them "advertising companies". If your advertising products disappear and the company would function more or less the same, that's not the primary product in your company's portfolio. Google would be crippled, as advertising is the primary product (fed by data from all the other services it offers, often at a loss). Similarly, most of apple software would be useless if they lost control of their hardware production/control.
  - idontevenknow1 6y ago
    Depends on your definition of advertising-company. If you sell eyeballs through ads that means you are an advertising company.
    - typenil 6y ago
      This is an article about monopolies - which are all about scale and market dominance. Yet you've excluded both from your analysis. It doesn't seem to be a good faith argument.
      - idontevenknow1 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 6y ago

Google's motto was and is (they remove it and put it back various time) "Do No Evil." They were the tech darling who innovated and created great tech products/services and all behind this mantra. We have since seen here on Hacker News the evil they do... i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 being one example of many. They get so much flack because they chose to have and promote that mantra then failed miserably in front of all here, many whom they inspired to get into tech and strive to work for them. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to work there!

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Why only block third party cookies? Block all cookies by default. If the user needs a cookie she can enable them. For example, on a per-site basis. Default setting is cookies on for all sites.

thayne 6y ago
Because that would be a terrible experience for consumers. Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to? Or whenever you want to use a shopping-cart? Do you want every site you ever go to to have a huge popup instructing you on how to enable cookies for the site? Not to mention how difficult this will make life for developers who use cookies for legitimate purposes.
- harry8 6y ago
  > Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to? Yes! Absolutely. Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no But only when you explicitly make the request to use a cart or press the login button. Silently block everything else. There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies. And I use chrome for them. I use firefox with all that crap disabled for everything else. Give it a try!
  - thayne 6y ago
    > Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no I don't see how you could implement that without sites abusing any click event to try and get you to enable cookies. > There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies Good for you. Most people need more than that.
    - harry8 6y ago
      What as many as 10? 15? Or even 50! Now count your cookies. Orders of magnitude different. Thanks Google! Nobody agreed to that. Literally nobody.

probably_wrong 6y ago

I got a different interpretation from that paragraph than what you suggest. The interview doesn't state that 3rd party cookies are good. Rather, they argue that they are required to have a "healthy" targeted ads market: > So the question then is, what do consumers want? Do they want no targeted advertising? Well, then you can’t have an ad tech industry. Do they want targeted advertising that benefits the business that’s sending it, like the dog walker or the New York Times? That would require competition in the ad tech market. Of course, that conclusion rests on the assumption that "we" want a targeted ad market, an assumption that many here will dispute. But that's not the point of the lawsuit - their point is rather "Since this market exists, then the people must want it. And since people want it, we need to ensure that there's enough competition". "This class of business shouldn't exist" is not within the scope of this particular case.