While the move addresses user privacy regulations and is a means of taking on rivals who use improved privacy as a selling point, critics also fear Alphabet s moves will benefit itself the most, meaning advertising spending will become even more concentrated on Google, thus harming consumers.
Some of the sandbox proposals are particularly divisive, including first-party sets – which allow multiple domains to declare themselves to be one domain for so they can exchange data amongst themselves and still say it s been kept private - one such set, for example, could be youtube.com, google.com, and google.co.uk. The W3C Technical Architecture Group has declared the proposal to be harmful to the web in its current form.
Google s Ask me anything on Privacy Sandbox was more about questions than answers theregister.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theregister.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Reinventing web advertising tech at a time of heightened privacy concern proves difficult Share
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Analysis With Google testing its FLoC ad technology in preparation for the planned elimination of third-party cookies next year, uncertainty about potential problems and growing legal support for privacy is shaking up the digital ad industry.
The move away from third-party cookies will have significant financial impact on the ad industry, and the internet ecosystem that depends on advertising – assuming you accept studies that credit third-party cookies with meaningful [PDF] rather than minimal [PDF] revenue. Our analysis suggests that the publishing industry will have to replace up to $10 billion in ad revenue with a combination of first-party data gathered through a combination of paywalls and required registrations, and updated contextual targeting and probabilistic audience modeling (analytics that incorporate an array of unknown elements), said consultancy McKins
Browser maker concerns
Browser maker Vivaldi said yesterday: FLoC off! Vivaldi does not support FLoC. Co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner added: Our privacy policy is simple and clear; we do not want to track you.
He added that FLoC would expose personal data in new ways. You might visit a website that relates to a highly personal subject that may or may not use FLoC ads, and now every other site that you visit gets told your FLoC ID, which shows that you have visited that specific kind of site, he said.
These risks could go beyond embarrassment to have serious implications for society if used by authoritarian governments. A dictatorship may be able to work out that dissenters often seem to have one of the same five FLoC IDs. Now anyone who visits a nationally controlled website with that ID could be at risk, he added. We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented.
Public Suffix List halts submissions from those seeking reprieve from iGiant s rules Share
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Marketers frantic to preserve their ad tracking capabilities in advance of Apple s iOS 14.5 privacy restrictions have overwhelmed a volunteer-maintained database used to oversee domain names and improve web security.
The Public Suffix List (PSL) is a Mozilla-founded, community-run project to provide a list of domain suffixes, from .com and .co.uk to things like github.io and pvt.k12.ma.us, that can be used to build effective top-level domains (eTLDs) that form the basis of the web s same-origin security model.
eLTDs exist as a designation because top-level domains (TLDs) themselves aren t sufficient to define the scope of a site.