It may yet deliver ads that disrespect your privacy less, but it's a brand new technology and it's off to a slow, rocky start.įLoC shows us why even a benign Google monoculture would hold back user privacy, and why Chrome needs a counterweight. The replacement is called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), and it's designed to thread the needle of enabling targeted ads while keeping users anonymous, by lumping similar users into great big groups, called Cohorts. It's got the message that users want less tracking and more privacy, but unlike Firefox and Safari, Chrome can't simply block the third-party cookies used for tracking, because Google's advertising business model (and therefore Chrome's very existence) depends on them.Ĭhrome is planning to ban third-party cookies, but not until at least 2023-years after Safari-because it needs to establish a replacement tracking tech. So instead of being logged into the giant surveillance monster while you were using its websites, you were logged into the giant surveillance monster all the time, unless you remembered to log out of the browser, which of course you didn't, because people just don't think about logging in and out of their browser.Īnd then this year we had a great illustration of the bind that Google's in even when it tries to do the right thing. Google pulled another bullish move in 2018 when it decided that logging into and out of a Google website like GMail or YouTube was the same as logging into the Chrome browser, because it could. If you wanted to top the search rankings, you had to play the AMP game. To incentivise the use of AMP, Google leveraged its search monopoly by creating "reserved" slots at the top of its mobile search rankings that were only available to AMP pages. To use AMP your pages had to load code from Google-owned domains, debugging your code required Google-owned tools, your pages were stored in a Google-owned cache, and they were displayed under a Google-owned domain, so that users weren't really on your website anymore, they were looking at your web pages on Google, thank you very much. In a move that could have come straight out of Redmond circa 1996, the AMP rulebook was written by Google and varied wildly from the open standards everyone had been working towards for the past fifteen years or so.ĪMP was superficially open, but there was no AMP without Google. However, as Chrome's popularity increased, Google was able to exert more and more influence on the web in service of its ad-based business model, to the detriment of users' privacy.įor example, in 2016 Google introduced AMP, a set of web standards that were designed to make websites faster on mobile devices. This meant that web applications mostly worked the same way, no matter what browser you used. Everyone benefitted.Īnd because none of the major browser vendors had enough market share to " embrace, extend and extinguish", as Microsoft had attempted when Internet Explorer was dominant, everyone was forced to follow the same open standards. It was an excellent product with a ravenous appetite for market share, and its noisy focus on speed and security forced its rivals to take notice and compete on the same terms. Google Chrome first appeared in 2008 and rapidly established itself as a browser that couldn't be ignored, thanks to some catchy marketing on Google's massive advertising platform. But it might also be the last, best hope for browser privacy we have. It's imperfect, for sure, and its glacial pace of development might even be holding us all up, as Scott Gilbertson thoughtfully illustrated in a recent article on The Register. This time Google has its hands on the wheel, and it's our privacy in the back seat, being taken for a ride.Ĭhrome needs a counterweight and, thankfully, it still has one in Apple's Safari browser. Last time it was Microsoft in the driver's seat, and open standards and security were left tumbling about in the rear without a seat belt. We've been there before and history suggests it's bad news. And even if you prefer a different browser, there's a good chance that you're using something that's based on Google Chrome, such as Edge, Vivaldi, Chromium, Brave, or Opera.Īfter a decade and and a half of relatively healthy competition between vendors, the World Wide Web is trending towards a browser monoculture. There's a good chance-roughly one in seven-that it's Google Chrome.
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