Linked List: March 4, 2021

Thursday, 4 March 2021

eBay Is Delisting Dr. Seuss Books Taken Out of Print This Week 

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Online marketplace eBay Inc. said it is working to prevent the resale of six Dr. Seuss books that were pulled earlier this week by the company in charge of the late author’s works because they contain offensive imagery.

“EBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an email. New copies of the six books were no longer for sale online at major retailers such as Barnes & Noble on Thursday afternoon, which put eBay among the most prominent platforms for the books to be sold.

Harry McCracken:

Ending publication of these books is a reasonable move, but I’m not sure about eBay’s logic here, other than avoiding bad PR. Unless it now wants to police its site and remove every old item containing offensive stereotypes, which would be a LOT of stuff.

(BTW, I would also have been fine with Dr. Seuss Enterprises revising these books to remove the stereotypes. They’ve already tampered with the Dr.’s legacy in a zillion ways that bother me a lot more.)

I agree with McCracken on both points. I mean, you can buy copies of Mein Kampf but not If I Ran the Zoo? Banning books is always a sign of out-of-control zealotry.

The EFF: ‘Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea’ 

Bennett Cyphers, writing for the EFF:

Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious — and potentially the most harmful.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.

Google’s pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the “privacy sandbox”) will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

This helps explain Google’s message yesterday. They’re moving their tracking from third-party cookies that they process through the cloud to tracking that’s done in Chrome. Basically I think that’s it.

If you prefer a Chromium-based browser, you should use one other than Chrome. I like Brave for my (occasional) Chromium browser needs, but Microsoft’s Edge might be a good choice too. Brave bills itself as a privacy browser; at this point it seems fair to say Google is turning Chrome into an anti-privacy browser. It’s that simple.

Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Washington Post back in October:

Over the last two decades, Google has made changes in drips rather than big makeovers. To see how search results have changed, what you’d need is a time machine. Good news: We have one of those!

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There’s more space dedicated to ads that look like search results. More results start with answer “snippets” — sometimes incorrect — ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to Google’s own properties such as Maps and YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data.

I’d say Google’s biggest weakness in search isn’t that would-be competitors have gotten better, but what Fowler illustrates here: Google’s own search results have clearly gotten worse. The comparison of how low they sometimes push the top actual result are eye opening. It’s been a slow boil from the Google of old to today, but if you took a Google search user from 2005 and showed them Google search today, they’d think it was halfway to Idiocracy. (Personally, I think it seems clear that the quality of Google search results — or at least the presentation of those results — started its decline when Marissa Mayer left Google to become CEO of Yahoo in 2012.)

This, effectively, is why I’ve been happy using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years now. I don’t think the breadth or accuracy of their actual search results is as good as Google’s, but because their presentation of results is better — far less cluttered, often with no ads in the results at all, never with more than two ads — I find the overall experience to be better, even putting aside all my concerns about Google and privacy.

The other thing I wonder about is how much modern web browsers have broken typical users of the habit of “going to Google”. How many people actually go to google.com to search, and how many just type search terms in the browser location field? If most people just type search terms in the location field, a browser that switches from Google to another engine by default will switch those users automatically. How many people would even notice a switch given that nearly all search engines style results in a generally Google-like way?

Thomas Claburn, writing for The Register:

Brave intends to make Tailcat the foundation of its own search service, Brave Search. The company hopes that its more than 25 million monthly active Brave customers will, after an initial period of testing and courtship, choose to make Brave Search their default search engine and will use it alongside other parts of its privacy-oriented portfolio, which also includes Brave Ads, news reader Brave Today, Brave Firewall+VPN, and video conferencing system Brave Together.

Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people’s privacy by not tracking or profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles.

The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option — for those who want to pay for search results without ads — though its more common incarnation is likely to be ad-supported, in conjunction with Brave Ads. The latter offers participants the option to receive 70 per cent of the payment made by the advertiser in a cryptocurrency called BAT (Brave Attention Token).

When, if ever, will popular browsers start defaulting to search engines other than Google? That’s the question.

And for Apple in particular, it’s a question of an enormous sum of money. The exact figure Google pays Apple in traffic acquisition costs as a result of it being the default search engine in Safari (which in turn is the default browser on iOS and the Mac) is a tightly held secret. But Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall estimated the figure at $9.5 billion for 2018 and $12 billion for 2019.

Putting aside the question of whether any non-Google search engine provides good enough search results to replace Google as Safari’s default — a huge question! — if Apple were to make such a move in the name of privacy, it almost certainly would come as a multi-billion dollar annual hit to the company’s Services revenue.

Apple’s total Services revenue for FY2020 was about $54 billion. Would they take a $10 billion hit to that in the name of privacy? (Perhaps more interesting to flip the question around: If they care so deeply about privacy as a human right, why haven’t they already?)