Irreal

If you’re like me, you’re apt to suspect that anything Google has to say about adtech and tracking is likely to be self-serving nonsense but when they make the claim that blocking cookies is bad for privacy you’d be excused for not bothering to read further. On the other hand, it does have a powerful pull because you’re curious as to what possible argument they could make.

Not much of an argument it turns out. Over at Freedom to Tinker, Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan take a steely-eyed look at Google’s latest pronouncement on cookies and privacy and give it a thorough fisking. Their post, Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection, refutes Google’s claims point by point.

They don’t spend much time on “blocking cookies is bad for privacy” because Google’s argument—it would only lead to worse behavior such as fingerprinting—is so weak that it doesn’t need much debunking. As Mayer and Narayanan point out, that would be like the police saying that they don’t want to crack down on pickpockets because the criminals would turn to worse behaviors like mugging.

If you’ve read Google’s original post, you owe it to yourself to read Mayer’s and Narayanan’s rebuttal. They do a wonderful job of demolishing Google’s arguments and demonstrating their self-serving nature. Their most telling point is a quote from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in which Zuboff says asking Google to give up violating our privacy is futile because doing so represents an existential threat to their business. It’s why I’ve long felt that we’ll never talk Google and the other adtech practitioners into behaving: you’d be asking for their suicide. Short of something like a rigorously enforced European style GDRP, they’ll never change. Maybe not even then.

In some very welcome news, Apple has announced that it will be implementing and enforcing a new anti-tracking policy in Safari. The new WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy lays out what types of tracking they will attempt to prevent and states explicitly that any attempts to bypass their anti-tracking protections will be treated just like any other exploitation of a security vulnerability. They also state that there will be no exceptions no matter how worthy the organization seeking one or how benign their intentions.

The types of tracking that they are seeking to prevent are all cross-site tracking and all covert tracking. Covert tracking is basically tracking that’s hidden from the user. It includes such things as fingerprinting and convert stateful tracking that surreptitiously stores tracking information on the user’s computer using facilities not intended for that purpose.

In their article about the announcement, The Next Web speculates that the move will force other browsers, such as Chrome, to take similar actions. I’m a little skeptical about that since the point of Chrome is to make it easier for Google to track user behavior, a point amply demonstrated by their recent decision to log you into Google under the covers when you’re logged into any Google account. Of course, some browsers, like Mozilla, have already taken similar steps and the WebKit announcement specifically gives them a shout out for being the inspiration for their own steps.

I’m under no illusion that Apple’s and Mozilla’s actions will end the scourge of adtech but I do welcome anything that makes it harder for them to spy on us.