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> I hope no one is saying Privacy Sandbox is worse than third party cookies Sort of like saying: "I hope no one is saying having a tracker in your car is worse

> I hope no one is saying Privacy Sandbox is worse than third party cookies Sort of like saying: "I hope no one is saying having a tracker in your car is worse than having a guy following you around." Sure, it's better. But it's not good either.

madrox 6y ago
Of course it isn't good. This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. However, that's not going to be the outcome. Antitrust scrutiny in this case means making it more fair to third party advertisers...the people who will be hit most by third party cookie disabling. As much as we want to hate on Google, articles like this won't make them move toward more privacy.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  I don’t want the web advertising industry to go away. It’s benign. If you don’t want advertisers to track you you have the option to default browse without cookies. Even better, default browse without cookies and JavaScript. Yes, I do this. If you understand how cookies work then this is a perfectly viable option for you. If you don’t, you likely don’t care about advertisers tracking you.
  - Cederfjard 6y ago
    I disagree with your last statement. People may care about being tracked even though they don’t understand the mechanism, or even that it’s happening.
    - CyberRabbi 6y ago
      Well I just think that if you aren’t aware you are being tracked, you probably don’t really care too much. People who care they are being tracked will take the time to learn how stop being tracked. That’s why I learned about cookies etc. I think this is probably a way for google to assert further control over the advertising industry, using the guise of improving user privacy. Like I said, most users don’t really care because if they did they would just disable cookies, so I think they are solving a problem no one is actually having and that seems suspicious.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  You present a false dichotomy. "Google's Privacy Sandbox" versus Third Party Cookies, as if those are the only alternatives. Now you are following along with another false dichotomy! > This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Here's a crazy idea. We don't need either Google's monopoly preserving Privacy "Sandbox" or third party cookies... and we don't need to do away with web advertising. We're not in a black and white world. Google can advertise on their home page and make money without all the crazy tracking bullshit. We know they can, because that's how they funded all the bullshit tracking.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    I'll add a third option: neither! Seriously, I've had 3rd party cookies disabled four years and almost nothing breaks. The last time I remember needing to enable them was some online homework system that came with a math textbook.
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      I feel like there are some misunderstandings in this thread. Let me summarize my understanding: Safari has effectively disabled third party cookies. Nothing broke. Chrome has announced that they will do the same in 2022. However, unlike Apple, Google doesn't want to cannibalize the ad industry so they decided to introduce this Privacy Sandbox which allows targeted advertising without sending a personal identifier to the server. The article that we are discussing is saying that this Privacy Sandbox will favor Google Ads. The top comment said that this article is likely astroturfing. It written by people affiliated with other ad networks, whose goal is to water down the Privacy Sandbox proposal so that it enables more tracking. Some people have said that they don't trust Google to implement Privacy Sandbox in a privacy friendly way, so it shouldn't exist at all. But that was never really on the table.
      - deadmutex 6y ago
        Thanks for the tl;dr. Should be top comment IMO, lol.
      - 6y ago
- dmix 6y ago
  I don't want web advertising to go away. The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves. Otherwise how are Youtube creators, newspapers, Firefox, etc going to operate with out it? Companies adding multiple megabytes of JS tools is probably another issue entirely as they often involve a variety of crap like 2-3 ad publishers, content recommendation services (chum), 5 different analytics and automation tools from "marketing", regulatory compliance modals/monitoring, e-commerce tools. And all of this is before the regular JS stuff is added (CNN for ex: adds both jQuery, backbone.js, AND React). Those issues are solved by competent web teams and for certain market segments of mega-firms this likely wont go away any time soon, so the ad blocks (really JS blockers) will remain. Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end. I haven't see the stats on retargeting, but I wouldn't mind that goes (across 3rd-parties). But I do see some value in demographic and behavioural ad targeting. If I have to see ads then I'd prefer they be targeted at me. I'm not sure what the solution here is but, outside of pseudo-anonymization. Because at the end of the day all that matters privacy-wise is identity. I could feed an ad engine locally with my attributes without directly revealing identity, as is largely the case today. But even that is a tradeoff.
  - hoppla 6y ago
    « The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves.» I use privacy badger as an ad blocker, even though it does not target ads. It somehow block privacy intrusive domains, which happen to be related to ads.
  - tadfisher 6y ago
    > Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end. Don't go there, please. At the very least it reveals you don't understand what "defined the police" means, and at worst you're insulting those who are living in constant fear and daily trauma. There are better analogies to use.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish The Police." --The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Nothing is free however. If advertisers can't violate one's privacy, that simply means they will pay less to the websites one uses, and that will lead to its quality deteriorating, or even more extreme content filters to appease advertisers and remain afloat.
  - visarga 6y ago
    You're assuming people won't create great things without ad profit. I submit Open Source and Wikipedia as evidence to the contrary. Not making a profit on the original creative act might lead to larger profits for society overall and indirect advantages to the original creators. And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion. It's the ad based content creators who are lacking in diversity, not the passionate creators who go in deep the rabbit hole. Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users.
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      > You're assuming people won't create great things without ad profit. I submit Open Source and Wikipedia as evidence to the contrary. Not making a profit on the original creative act might lead to larger profits for society overall and indirect advantages to the original creators. Both examples you listed are products that are feasibly created by the many small contributors. Many products cannot feasibly be created in such a manner and rely on some manner of income to remain feasible. There are quite a few content creators that are capable of producing content because their efforts are supported by advertisement. It would be hard for them to operate on the many small contributions-model. > And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion. Few men enjoy the luxury to devote so much time to their passions when other parts of their time are allocated to securing the income they need to feed themselves. > Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users. This situation would indeed benefit the visitor more; it would not benefit the advertiser, nor the middleman, nor the space where the advertisement stands.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  >This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away I had a chuckle from this, but many here seem to be taking the statement at face value.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    I’d think you’d find a broader consensus around “tracking must die” than “advertising must die”. Though advertising itself is often obnoxious and motivation for large-scale fraud.
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      Ad-fraud is a disturbing reality. HN's anti-business consensus is a disturbing nightmare.
      - kergonath 6y ago
        > HN's anti-business consensus Any evidence of that? Also, anti-advertising is not anti-business. And the good thing with a nightmare is that it disappears once you open your eyes and see what the reality actually is like.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        > HN's anti-business consensus is a disturbing nightmare. I see this tact in almost every thread about Google and Facebook. Right along with "HN (users) are against any advertising". This sort of ad-hominem approach to debate is non-constructive and frankly bullshit. HN advertises. It's owned and operated by an actual profit making business. Nobody complains about that. People don't mind because fundamentally we know when we leave HackerNews, YCombinator isn't following us. The consensus is largely not anti-business, it is against tracking. If I'm anti-business, does that make you a Google shill? Let's try to talk about the topic and not the attitude of the people here.
- bostik 6y ago
  > This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Not go away. Just have their ability to invade privacy spayed and neutered. If it makes the industry smaller in aggregate, I'll take that as a beneficial side effect. I wrote the following, as a comment on HN, more than 5 years ago. https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
  - eitland 6y ago
    Nice summary, bookmarked so I can point to it in future discussions here and elsewhere.
- crypster 6y ago
  > This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Sure let's go back to the ol' day where business would reach out to their clientele only on bill boards and news papers. Oh wait, I guess I should apply for a physical newspaper subscription too!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nly 6y ago
Having a tracker in your car is far worse than having a guy following you around. The latter doesn't scale to millions of stalkees with almost zero cost, and is far less conspicuous.

madrox 6y ago

Of course it isn't good. This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. However, that's not going to be the outcome. Antitrust scrutiny in this case means making it more fair to third party advertisers...the people who will be hit most by third party cookie disabling. As much as we want to hate on Google, articles like this won't make them move toward more privacy.

CyberRabbi 6y ago
I don’t want the web advertising industry to go away. It’s benign. If you don’t want advertisers to track you you have the option to default browse without cookies. Even better, default browse without cookies and JavaScript. Yes, I do this. If you understand how cookies work then this is a perfectly viable option for you. If you don’t, you likely don’t care about advertisers tracking you.
- Cederfjard 6y ago
  I disagree with your last statement. People may care about being tracked even though they don’t understand the mechanism, or even that it’s happening.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    Well I just think that if you aren’t aware you are being tracked, you probably don’t really care too much. People who care they are being tracked will take the time to learn how stop being tracked. That’s why I learned about cookies etc. I think this is probably a way for google to assert further control over the advertising industry, using the guise of improving user privacy. Like I said, most users don’t really care because if they did they would just disable cookies, so I think they are solving a problem no one is actually having and that seems suspicious.
ogre_codes 6y ago
You present a false dichotomy. "Google's Privacy Sandbox" versus Third Party Cookies, as if those are the only alternatives. Now you are following along with another false dichotomy! > This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Here's a crazy idea. We don't need either Google's monopoly preserving Privacy "Sandbox" or third party cookies... and we don't need to do away with web advertising. We're not in a black and white world. Google can advertise on their home page and make money without all the crazy tracking bullshit. We know they can, because that's how they funded all the bullshit tracking.
- smichel17 6y ago
  I'll add a third option: neither! Seriously, I've had 3rd party cookies disabled four years and almost nothing breaks. The last time I remember needing to enable them was some online homework system that came with a math textbook.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    I feel like there are some misunderstandings in this thread. Let me summarize my understanding: Safari has effectively disabled third party cookies. Nothing broke. Chrome has announced that they will do the same in 2022. However, unlike Apple, Google doesn't want to cannibalize the ad industry so they decided to introduce this Privacy Sandbox which allows targeted advertising without sending a personal identifier to the server. The article that we are discussing is saying that this Privacy Sandbox will favor Google Ads. The top comment said that this article is likely astroturfing. It written by people affiliated with other ad networks, whose goal is to water down the Privacy Sandbox proposal so that it enables more tracking. Some people have said that they don't trust Google to implement Privacy Sandbox in a privacy friendly way, so it shouldn't exist at all. But that was never really on the table.
    - deadmutex 6y ago
      Thanks for the tl;dr. Should be top comment IMO, lol.
    - 6y ago
dmix 6y ago
I don't want web advertising to go away. The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves. Otherwise how are Youtube creators, newspapers, Firefox, etc going to operate with out it? Companies adding multiple megabytes of JS tools is probably another issue entirely as they often involve a variety of crap like 2-3 ad publishers, content recommendation services (chum), 5 different analytics and automation tools from "marketing", regulatory compliance modals/monitoring, e-commerce tools. And all of this is before the regular JS stuff is added (CNN for ex: adds both jQuery, backbone.js, AND React). Those issues are solved by competent web teams and for certain market segments of mega-firms this likely wont go away any time soon, so the ad blocks (really JS blockers) will remain. Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end. I haven't see the stats on retargeting, but I wouldn't mind that goes (across 3rd-parties). But I do see some value in demographic and behavioural ad targeting. If I have to see ads then I'd prefer they be targeted at me. I'm not sure what the solution here is but, outside of pseudo-anonymization. Because at the end of the day all that matters privacy-wise is identity. I could feed an ad engine locally with my attributes without directly revealing identity, as is largely the case today. But even that is a tradeoff.
- hoppla 6y ago
  « The issue here is excessively intrusive tracking, not the ads themselves.» I use privacy badger as an ad blocker, even though it does not target ads. It somehow block privacy intrusive domains, which happen to be related to ads.
- tadfisher 6y ago
  > Just like "defund the police" is a stupid self-alienating stance to stake, so is expecting web ads to end. Don't go there, please. At the very least it reveals you don't understand what "defined the police" means, and at worst you're insulting those who are living in constant fear and daily trauma. There are better analogies to use.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish The Police." --The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Nothing is free however. If advertisers can't violate one's privacy, that simply means they will pay less to the websites one uses, and that will lead to its quality deteriorating, or even more extreme content filters to appease advertisers and remain afloat.
- visarga 6y ago
  You're assuming people won't create great things without ad profit. I submit Open Source and Wikipedia as evidence to the contrary. Not making a profit on the original creative act might lead to larger profits for society overall and indirect advantages to the original creators. And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion. It's the ad based content creators who are lacking in diversity, not the passionate creators who go in deep the rabbit hole. Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    > You're assuming people won't create great things without ad profit. I submit Open Source and Wikipedia as evidence to the contrary. Not making a profit on the original creative act might lead to larger profits for society overall and indirect advantages to the original creators. Both examples you listed are products that are feasibly created by the many small contributors. Many products cannot feasibly be created in such a manner and rely on some manner of income to remain feasible. There are quite a few content creators that are capable of producing content because their efforts are supported by advertisement. It would be hard for them to operate on the many small contributions-model. > And usually content created for profit is quite untrustworthy, I prefer content created out of passion. Few men enjoy the luxury to devote so much time to their passions when other parts of their time are allocated to securing the income they need to feed themselves. > Also, there's nothing wrong with ads, but they need to be topical to the content at hand, not targeted to users. This situation would indeed benefit the visitor more; it would not benefit the advertiser, nor the middleman, nor the space where the advertisement stands.
aww_dang 6y ago
>This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away I had a chuckle from this, but many here seem to be taking the statement at face value.
- kergonath 6y ago
  I’d think you’d find a broader consensus around “tracking must die” than “advertising must die”. Though advertising itself is often obnoxious and motivation for large-scale fraud.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Ad-fraud is a disturbing reality. HN's anti-business consensus is a disturbing nightmare.
    - kergonath 6y ago
      > HN's anti-business consensus Any evidence of that? Also, anti-advertising is not anti-business. And the good thing with a nightmare is that it disappears once you open your eyes and see what the reality actually is like.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > HN's anti-business consensus is a disturbing nightmare. I see this tact in almost every thread about Google and Facebook. Right along with "HN (users) are against any advertising". This sort of ad-hominem approach to debate is non-constructive and frankly bullshit. HN advertises. It's owned and operated by an actual profit making business. Nobody complains about that. People don't mind because fundamentally we know when we leave HackerNews, YCombinator isn't following us. The consensus is largely not anti-business, it is against tracking. If I'm anti-business, does that make you a Google shill? Let's try to talk about the topic and not the attitude of the people here.
bostik 6y ago
> This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Not go away. Just have their ability to invade privacy spayed and neutered. If it makes the industry smaller in aggregate, I'll take that as a beneficial side effect. I wrote the following, as a comment on HN, more than 5 years ago. https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
- eitland 6y ago
  Nice summary, bookmarked so I can point to it in future discussions here and elsewhere.
crypster 6y ago
> This is HN, and we want the web advertising industry to go away. Sure let's go back to the ol' day where business would reach out to their clientele only on bill boards and news papers. Oh wait, I guess I should apply for a physical newspaper subscription too!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nly 6y ago

Having a tracker in your car is far worse than having a guy following you around. The latter doesn't scale to millions of stalkees with almost zero cost, and is far less conspicuous.