Linked List: February 2, 2022

Wednesday, 2 February 2022

‘It’s Almost as if One Company Shouldn’t Simultaneously Be the Market Leader in Three Separate Industries: Search, Advertising, and Web Browsing’ 

Jeremy Keith, writing last April about FLoC:

Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Google’s Chrome browser will also disable third-party cookies at some time in the future (they’re waiting to shut that barn door until the fire is good’n’raging). But Google isn’t just in the browser business. Google is also in the ad tech business. So they still want advertisers to be able to target end users.

Yes, this is quite the cognitive dissonance: one part of the business is building a user agent while a different part of the company is working on ways of tracking end users. It’s almost as if one company shouldn’t simultaneously be the market leader in three separate industries: search, advertising, and web browsing. (Seriously though, I honestly think Google’s search engine would get better if it were split off from the parent company, and I think that Google’s web browser would also get better if it were a separate enterprise.)

Anyway, one possible way of tracking users without technically tracking individual users is to assign them to buckets, or cohorts of interest based on their browsing habits. Does that make you feel safer? Me neither.

This was written about FLoC, but applies perfectly to Topics as well.

Robin Berjon on ‘Topics’, Google’s Proposed Replacement for FLoC 

Robin Berjon, who works on data governance and privacy for The New York Times, posted an insightful thread on Twitter last week looking at Google’s proposed “Topics” standard:

On any given page load, any origin (top or embedded) can become eligible to learn the topics matching the top level origin for that user. If you visit berjon.com and I embed adsA.org, both of these could know you like cats. [...]

The mechanism that controls who benefits from observing people is origin-based. So if CoolNicheSite.org and VaxxAreMurder.com both embed adsA.org, the latter free-rides on the topic value carefully curated by the former. [...]

It’s a rich-get-richer proposal: the more sites a third party is on, the more likely it is to get topics to target (meaning it gets more publishers, meaning more topics…). The explainer acknowledges that but doesn’t list it as an issue.

That last point is one of my key takeaways. Topics does look better than FLoC, but that’s not saying much. And it’s hard to look at Topics as anything other than a proposal by Google for Google. It benefits Google’s ad business because Google’s ads are used on so many sites, and it’s only possible that it’ll become widely deployed because Google controls Chrome, by far the most popular web browser in use today.

I wondered last week if Topics needs to be built into web browsers. The answer is yes, it does. Google can single-handedly make Topics available to just under two-thirds of the market (Chrome’s share). But I can’t see why any other browser would consider supporting Topics. Google wants to keep tracking users across the entire web in a world where users realize they don’t want to be tracked. Why help Google?

Google sees Chrome as a way to embed the entire web into an iframe on Google.com.

(Also, iframes were a terrible mistake and never should have existed in the first place.)