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"The Commission is concerned that Google’s allegedly intentional conducts aimed at giving [Google’s ad exchange] AdX a competitive advantage and may have forecl

"The Commission is concerned that Google’s allegedly intentional conducts aimed at giving [Google’s ad exchange] AdX a competitive advantage and may have foreclosed rival ad exchanges." So the goal is for there to be more competition among advertisers? That might help ad purchasers (ie. mostly corporations), but consumers are still going to be screwed as this does nothing to stop the spying and advertising that are worst scourges that Google has imposed upon the world.

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marginalia_nu 3y ago
Competition is good. Fracturing the market means it's harder for any one actor to have all the information, and encourages the industry to look for other models.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  One actor may not get that information directly, but it will still be bought and sold, like any other commodity. Unless the information is impossible to collect in the first place, it will be collected, traded, and consolidated.
wongarsu 3y ago
The EU already made multiple attempts to get that under control, notably first with the Cookie Law and later with GDPR. The problem is that those have mechanism that allow the user to accept tracking, and Google does its best to get website owners to make their user agree by any means nessesary. In analytics there's some competition, and I can run self-hosted cookieless Maomo or plausibly.io if I want to get actionable insights without having the user opt-out of privacy protections. In advertising there's much less competition, and thus little in the way of privacy-friendly options. Forcing more competion might solve this.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Cookies have not been necessary for user tracking for decades. Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well. The outrage over cookies is quaint, and only demonstrates that people who freak out over them don't understand modern tracking technology at all.
  - cccbbbaaa 3y ago
    Sure, but remember that: - the so-called “cookie law” is not limited to cookies (see ePrivacy article 5(3) for more information, it's actually any technique allowing to store or retrieve information from a user's terminal); - ePrivacy exists since 2002 (so, decades); - any kind of tracking allowing to identify unique users will require consent, cookies or not.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    > Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well. Those work, but Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting. Hence all their work on privacy sandbox (attempting to preserve as much of the economic effects of cross-site tracking while fixing the privacy leak).
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      "Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting" 1 - Why would I trust anything Google says? 2 - What else could they use that information for apart from ad targeting that they're not telling us about?
      - jefftk 3y ago
        1: Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment. (Also, I worked at Google until a little over a year ago and if we'd been using fingerprinting for ad targeting I would have seen it.) 2: Detecting fraud and abuse, which is generally interpreted as not requiring consent under the GDPR (though I think that may not be correct: https://www.jefftk.com/p/can-ads-be-gdpr-compliant https://www.jefftk.com/p/can-ads-be-gdpr-compliant).
bbor 3y ago
Yeah this is an article about antitrust. Bringing up data collection is about as relevant as criticizing the commission for not tackling their carbon footprint. Antitrust and stronger data protections can coexist :) Of course that’s all just deck chairs on the titanic. We need to make Display advertising illegal world-wide…

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[deleted]

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Competition is good. Fracturing the market means it's harder for any one actor to have all the information, and encourages the industry to look for other models.

pmoriarty 3y ago
One actor may not get that information directly, but it will still be bought and sold, like any other commodity. Unless the information is impossible to collect in the first place, it will be collected, traded, and consolidated.

wongarsu 3y ago

The EU already made multiple attempts to get that under control, notably first with the Cookie Law and later with GDPR. The problem is that those have mechanism that allow the user to accept tracking, and Google does its best to get website owners to make their user agree by any means nessesary. In analytics there's some competition, and I can run self-hosted cookieless Maomo or plausibly.io if I want to get actionable insights without having the user opt-out of privacy protections. In advertising there's much less competition, and thus little in the way of privacy-friendly options. Forcing more competion might solve this.

pmoriarty 3y ago
Cookies have not been necessary for user tracking for decades. Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well. The outrage over cookies is quaint, and only demonstrates that people who freak out over them don't understand modern tracking technology at all.
- cccbbbaaa 3y ago
  Sure, but remember that: - the so-called “cookie law” is not limited to cookies (see ePrivacy article 5(3) for more information, it's actually any technique allowing to store or retrieve information from a user's terminal); - ePrivacy exists since 2002 (so, decades); - any kind of tracking allowing to identify unique users will require consent, cookies or not.
- jefftk 3y ago
  > Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well. Those work, but Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting. Hence all their work on privacy sandbox (attempting to preserve as much of the economic effects of cross-site tracking while fixing the privacy leak).
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting" 1 - Why would I trust anything Google says? 2 - What else could they use that information for apart from ad targeting that they're not telling us about?
    - jefftk 3y ago
      1: Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment. (Also, I worked at Google until a little over a year ago and if we'd been using fingerprinting for ad targeting I would have seen it.) 2: Detecting fraud and abuse, which is generally interpreted as not requiring consent under the GDPR (though I think that may not be correct: https://www.jefftk.com/p/can-ads-be-gdpr-compliant https://www.jefftk.com/p/can-ads-be-gdpr-compliant).

bbor 3y ago

Yeah this is an article about antitrust. Bringing up data collection is about as relevant as criticizing the commission for not tackling their carbon footprint. Antitrust and stronger data protections can coexist :) Of course that’s all just deck chairs on the titanic. We need to make Display advertising illegal world-wide…