Do you use the Chrome browser? Google just baked a user-tracking ad service right into it.

[thewayne]

I've never liked the Chrome browser, personally, for two reasons. It had an auto-update that at the time that I learned about it you couldn't disable, and it eats an awful lot of resources. And I don't use it except on a couple of PCs at work, not on my personal work station.

So let me give you a little background on how cookies can track you across web sites.

First off, don't go thinking that Google is mainly a search engine company. They are an advertising company. They make their money off of selling (functionally) ad space to companies through search results and looking at key words in your email. NEVER FORGET THIS. It used to be this was accomplished by what is known as third-party cookies. This was a special kind of cookie that could persist across web sites and browser sessions.

For example, you buy a pair of shoes off of Amazon. Amazon keeps a cookie (or three) in your browser's cookie cache that remembers some information about you, and theoretically no one except Amazon can read that information. So we have an Amazon.com cookie. Now, a super cookie is just a cookie with the name .Com and that's it. And because it's a top-level domain (TLD), apparently it can read some information below it, such as the Amazon.com cookie. It may not know what the information within the Amazon.com cookies means, but it knows the information is there and might be able to make some guesses.

Advertisers want as much information about people as they can get, supercookies are one such tool. Another tool is tracking pixels. These are invisible 1 pixel images that are inserted into a page or email that link to a server where the tracking pixel has a specific identity tied to the email or page that you open. If your email or web page doesn't block images or tracking pixels, when you open the page, that pixel is loaded - and the tracker database knows that specific pixel was loaded and ties that page or your email into tracking information about you.

Now, email programs can be configured to block tracking pixels and supercookies, which advertisers hate because they get less analytic information which means less information they can sell to potential ad or analytics buyers. And remember, Google is in the ad serving business.

Google came up with an alternative, baked into the browser that they want everyone to use. When you open Gmail, or Google Search, in Firefox or Microsoft Edge or Safari, you get this lovely popup: For the best experience, open this page in Google Chrome. Gee, wonder why! Now what Google is doing is they analyze the page that your browser is now looking at and generates a 'topic list', along with a unique identifier for your PC, and now they have analytics that they can sell for ad buyers! All without cookies! Oh, and it gets better! Google claims "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

They also claim that they'll block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. I think Firefox now does that by default. And while Microsoft Edge, which is a pretty good browser, is built on Chrome code, it can also block third-party cookies.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

Comments

[silveradept]

Yep, definitely time to ditch Chrome and Chromium things wherever possible, just as a way of stopping Google from getting their claws into us even more than they already are. (Admittedly, it won't stop them completely, I have Google accounts and use their platforms like Android) Reminds me that I should probably get the latest Firefox build for my SBCs, since they now supposedly support hardware acceleration for them.