But other people figured out what it meant: Critics say new Google rules put profits over privacy
Basically, Google was reversing its long-held pledge to fight the privacy-evil practice of fingerprinting.
Most people are aware, or at least dimly aware, that they’re being watched, followed, profiled and targeted as they surf the web, especially by the ads ecosystem. After all, the more a company or an industry can monitor, profile and target individual users, the more money they can make from targeting them with individually-tailored ads. Virtually no one understands the scope and scale of these practices, including me.
As a privacy professional, I always defended a pragmatic approach. An ads-based ecosystem could co-exist with privacy laws in a cookie-based world, given that there were certain protections, transparency and user controls for cookies. And the regulators of the world largely approached online ads surveillance problems from a cookie-based perspective. But while they were barking up the cookie-tree, the industry was rolling out far more invasive and invisible individual-level tracking and profiling tools called fingerprinting. If you don’t know, fingerprinting is a technique to collect lots of individual little settings about users’ devices that can identify them uniquely, much like a fingerprint of a person’s thumb is composed of lots of little lines that individually mean nothing, but together identify a person. Fingerprinting is an evil privacy practice, with almost zero transparency or user controls. In my long privacy career, I always held the line against it.
Increasingly, small players in the ads ecosystem resorted to fingerprinting, as an alternative to cookies. Google, after decades-long principled objection to it, has now raced to the bottom to join its competitors. Of course, it’s entirely different for the super-dominant player in the ads ecosystem to join its tiny competitors in bad privacy practices.
Perhaps privacy regulators will learn from their mis-guided focus on cookies to look at fingerprinting. But the USA is de-regulating fast, and Europe is out-gunned and out-manoeuvred by some players in the tech industry. Think about the resource imbalance, to take one public fact: Google’s CEO is paid, individually, about the same as the entire operating budgets of all 27 EU DPAs, combined. Now picture a small, valiant under-resourced DPA trying to take that on.
I think of privacy as a series of ethical choices to respect the individual, and laws that try to back that up, however imperfectly. But in the war of principles v profits, it’s hard for principles to win. Maybe shareholders will get richer, but humanity will be poorer. For me personally, it’s sad to see your life’s work deracinated.
