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Comment by spinningslate | Hacker News Reader

this. I'm fine with GP's use of "finding" a solution. Yes, they found one; finding solutions is a central process in software.

But I'm absolutely not fine with the wording. When confronted with the phrase "Google says it may have found a privacy-friendly substitute to cookies", I'd wager most people would think "this improves my privacy in a general way".

It doesn't. What it actually means is: Google will make it more difficult for others to track you, but Google will remain committed to tracking everything about you that it possibly can. Except silently, and without your ability to opt out using ad blockers etc.

Net result: even less control over your privacy, and Google further entrenches its monopoly to boot.

That's not an improvement in privacy.

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> That's not an improvement in privacy.

Okay, that's obviously not true from your own comment, you also say:

> Google will make it more difficult for others to track you

So if Google can still track me at the same level, but others can no longer track me, that IS an improvement in privacy. Not from Google, but from everyone else.

I get and agree with your point about how it's an advantage for Google because they can make their tracking harder to avoid and lock others out, but I find it hard to sell "This is not an improvement in privacy" as being unequivocally true.

> So if Google can still track me at the same level, but others can no longer track me, that IS an improvement in privacy.

This is only true if Google does not sell the gathered information to others. If they sell the data, the net privacy gain is nil.

Google doesn't sell your personal information to anyone. They sell ads that are targeted based on your personal information. Selling your information directly would entirely negate their market advantage in advertising, it would be suicide for Google. Facebook has been known to do this, Google has not.

Not saying you are one such person, or that you are doing so intentionally, but this argument is a clever sleight of hand employed by surveillance capitalists and their apologists to deflect attention away from the real issue: that thousands of well-paid, highly intelligent engineers devote 40+ hours a week to coming up with ways to influence your behavior.

“Selling personal data” — as if your particular affinity for left handed baseball gloves were of special interest to large corporations — is a red herring. Let’s stop perpetuating it.

But there are companies that sell personal data. Google is not one of them. The phone companies sell your location. There are regular articles about companies buying up chrome extensions to harvest/sell browsing data. Etc

OP also says > but Google will remain committed to tracking everything about you that it possibly can. Except silently, and without your ability to opt out using ad blockers etc.

Also others may no longer track you at the moment but they definitely will do in the future.

So... Google breached a bit deeper in our privacy and paved the way for others to follow them. I can't help seeing them so evil.

Google will track you more since adblockers will do nothing against this new practice.

So, again, this is not an improvement for users privacy.

This does not address my point at all, which is that if it locks out OTHER parties that currently abuse third party cookies from tracking, there's a substantial improvement for user privacy from those parties.

Not to mention that while adblockers currently do not do anything against this practice, this does not mean that adblockers can never come up with anything to block this tracking.

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