Google basically has tracked the crap out of everybody without caring one bit about it, and now under regulatory pressure finds itself caring about privacy. Th

Google basically has tracked the crap out of everybody without caring one bit about it, and now under regulatory pressure finds itself caring about privacy. They're going for this "reasonable middle-ground" approach but this is an issue where a compromise is not possible. This Sandbox idea basically means that instead of every 3rd party tracking the crap out of you, it's now exclusively in Google's hands. Where they may track "a little". There's even a privacy budget, where it is decided what "a little" means. Guess who controls this budget? Tracking should be opt-in. And not the Apple way either, where you "ask" the tracker to stop tracking whilst it happily continues. It should block tracking at a technical level. Apps can give intelligent options: - Enable tracking: app is free, some personalized ads. - Disable tracking: app is free, but more ads, that are not personalized. - Disable tracking: pay $ for non-tracked non-ad experience. This is real user choice. A privacy sandbox is no choice, you can't opt-out of it. To remind myself of how creepy tracking is, I often visualize the physical analogy. You're at home and somebody stands behind you, making notes of every webpage you visit, and when. You take a drive, and a car is following you all day, making notes of where you went. As you arrive at your friends' house, the follower makes photos of your friends and tries to find out their names, the connection is logged and they make a note to follow that person too. The creep following you has plugged a cable in your camera so that when you make a photo or video, they get a direct copy, along with all metadata. You want to send a postcard to your parents but the follower snags it from your hands, opens it, makes a copy and scans it for clues. You put some of your valuables in a storage box but the follower has a spare key and regularly inspects it. Not a single of the above interactions would be acceptable in the physical world, but it's the norm in the digital world. And to finish the analogy, the output of all of this is junk mail in the mail box which you immediately throw in the paper garbage department. Also, any of the above can be shared at will with institutions. Which seems totally reasonable, until it's not. Governments can turn against their citizens, it's common, also today. I don't mean to escalate this to unintended proportions but I can't help but share this powerful example: During WW2, Germany occupied the Netherlands and the one thing that helped them to find Jewish people was a single data field in the population registry: religion. Would you have ever guessed or anticipated that such a single unimportant piece of data would have led to the ultimate consequence? That's why privacy is a human right. Stand for it with everything you got.