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.