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Nathan Schneider reshared this.

in reply to jonny (good kind)

jonny (good kind)
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jonny (good kind)
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Having ublock origin on your mobile browser is a game changer - and soon Firefox will be the only way to get it on your desktop browser too.

Remember Google's plan described in discovery documents from one of its antitrust lawsuits: in the name of privacy, block 3rd party ads and use the dominance of chrome to only allow google ads at the browser level. Your browser choice is not a neutral choice, google sees it as an integral part of their strategy to monopolize ads, and with that the entire web.

in reply to jonny (good kind)

jonny (good kind)
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jonny (good kind)
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FAQ for post repliers since this has escaped my usual circles
in reply to jonny (good kind)

Hubert Figuière
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Hubert Figuière
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is there an actual link to the document or to an article reporting on it (couldn't find one)?

People use to find me paranoid when I said it was the intent... (in a company that had all to lose with this)

in reply to Hubert Figuière

jonny (good kind)
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jonny (good kind)
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Yep - page 94, project NERA and the privacy sandbox
storage.courtlistener.com/reca…

"Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy.
Google does not actually put a stop to user profiling or targeted advertising—it puts Google’s Chrome browser at the center of tracking and targeting."

To get publishers to give Google exclusive access over their ad inventory, Google set publishers up for a lose/lose scenario. First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology. The effect of this practice is 96 to rob publishers of the exclusive use of their audience data (e.g., data on what users read on The Dallas Morning News), thereby depreciating the value of publisher
Chrome is the leading computer browser in the United States with almost 60 percent market share. Chrome has power over publishers because it controls a captive segment of their online users; consequently, publishers do not have alternative ways to reach the users that access the internet using Google’s browser. 264. After using Chrome to track publishers’ users, Google turned around and offered to give publishers the ability to tap into Google’s now-deeper trove of user data in exchange for the publishers’ agreement to give Google exclusive control over their ad space. If publishers did not agree to the new exclusivity terms, Google would continue to use Chrome to collect data about their users to sell more Google ads at the expense of the publishers’ ad space. For Google, Project NERA represented a win-win.
Privacy Sandbox 265. As regulatory scrutiny around Google and other Big Tech firms increased globally, Google transitioned from Project NERA to “Privacy Sandbox.” Regulators around the world were increasingly concerned about the extent to which firms like Google tracked consumers. Of any company on the internet, Google was number one in the world when it came to tracking users online through cookies. The leader in cookie-based tracking needed a way to deflect any potential regulation of its business. To address these concerns, Google would take a new approach to building a walled garden out of the open web and ground that approach in privacy language. 266. Google’s new scheme is, in essence, to wall off the entire portion of the internet that consumers access through Google’s Chrome browser. By the end of 2022, Google plans to modify Chrome to block publishers and advertisers from using the type of cookies they rely on to track 97 users and target ads. Then, Google, through Chrome, will offer publishers and advertisers new and alternative tracking mechanisms outlined in a set of proposals that Google has dubbed Privacy Sandbox. Overall, the changes are anticompetitive because they raise barriers to entry and exclude competition in the exchange and ad buying tool markets, which will further expand the already- dominant market power of Google’s advertising businesses
To summarize, Google’s upcoming cookie changes in the name of privacy are a ruse to further Google’s longstanding plan to advantage itself by creating a closed ecosystem out of the open web. Project NERA was Google’s first scheme; then, to deflect growing regulatory concern over its own privacy and intrusive cookie practices with consumers, Google launched “Privacy Sandbox,” new plans to wall off the internet accessed through Chrome. Google’s aim is to further squeeze competition in the exchange and ad buying tool markets by restricting competitors’ ability to track users and target ads. 272. At the same time, Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy. Google does not actually put a stop to user profiling or targeted advertising—it puts Google’s Chrome browser at the center of tracking and targeting. Google does not put a stop to Google’s tracking of users on Chrome; it does not put a stop to Google’s tracking of users through cookie workarounds; it does not put a stop to Google’s tracking of users across the largest sites in the world. In fact, the new Google Chrome tracking groups create something akin to a Google social credit score based on group identity. As The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently summarized: “Today, trackers follow you around the web, skulking in the digital shadows in order to guess at what kind of person you might be. In Google’s future, they will sit back, relax and let your browser do the work for them. …. "

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