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The Google Chrome team is under pressure from competitors on ad tracking. Apple has long offered advanced protection against tracking cookies, while Mozilla recently announced that Firefox would begin to block tracking cookies by default. Microsoft has also experimented with the tracking protection features in Edge.
But Google has a problem: it makes the most of its money by selling ads. The adoption of the same aggressive cookies blocking techniques as those of its competitors could prevent Google's customers from targeting their ads, which could adversely affect Google's profitability.
Thus, in a blog post published last week, Google introduced another vision of privacy: a vision that restricts certain forms of user tracking without blocking the use of short-term tracking cookies.
"Blocking cookies with no other way to deliver relevant ads dramatically reduces publishers' primary means of financing, jeopardizing the future of the dynamic Web," writes Justin Schuh of Google. (These publishers, of course, include Ars's publisher, Conde Nast, who uses cookies to serve targeted ads because they generate more revenue to support our journalism.)
Google also warns that the complete blocking of tracking cookies will encourage ad networks to use browser fingerprints as an alternative means of tracking users. With this technique, a site collects many small data on a user's browser (browser version, installed fonts, active extensions, screen size, etc.) to generate a "fingerprint" identifying unique a particular device.
Google's proposal is to declare war on fingerprint browsers while gradually limiting the use of cookies for targeting ads.
A confidentiality sandbox?
To avoid fingerprints, Google says that it is working on a new approach called "confidentiality budget". According to this approach, the browser would impose a strict limit on the amount of information that a site might ask the browser and that could reveal the identity of a user. If a site exceeds the ceiling, the browser generates an error or returns deliberately inaccurate or generic information.
But this is only a proposal, not a shipping feature. And it presents obvious challenges. Some API calls may return so much information that they can identify the user all by themselves. If a site makes one of these calls, the browser must notify the user and obtain explicit approval, which can be inconvenient for users. In addition, a too strict privacy protection budget could break some existing sites, even if they did not take users' fingerprints.
The privacy budget is one of the elements of a larger framework that Google calls a "privacy sandbox". The goal is to allow advertisers to serve more relevant ads without allowing them to track individual users:
We're studying how to serve ads to large groups of similar people without letting the individual credentials leave your browser. We use the differential privacy techniques we've been using in Chrome for almost 5 years to collect anonymous telemetry information. New technologies such as Federated Learning show that it is possible for your browser to avoid revealing that you are a member of a group that likes Beyoncé and knitted vests until the group contains thousands of other people.
Some privacy experts remain skeptical
The publication of Google has been criticized by two computer scientists Princeton who have long advocated a more strict protection of privacy browsers. They point out that Apple and Mozilla are also striving to limit the fingerprints of browsers. They argue that it is illogical to say that the risk of taking fingerprints is a reason for not adopting strict restrictions on cookie tracking.
The researchers challenged Google's assertion that the use of tracking cookies would hurt the economic foundation of the online advertising industry. They point out that following the EU's adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation, the New York Times has stopped using tracking cookies in Europe. The Gray Lady opted for contextual and geographic advertising targeting, which did not reduce advertising revenue.
They also argued that Google now endorses the ideas that the company considered impractical at the beginning of this decade.
"Targeting privacy-preserving ads has been an active area of research for more than a decade," the couple wrote. They argue that Google was refusing alternatives to tracking cookie-based ads in the Do not Keep Tracking debate earlier in the decade. "We're happy that Google is taking this direction more seriously now, but some late thinking does not make much progress."
Browser privacy has become an important differentiator for Google's competitors in the browser market. Apple has aired ads in recent months touting the privacy protections offered by the iPhone. These attacks put Google in a difficult position because Google can not match the privacy protections of its rivals without potentially harming its own lucrative business.
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