At a certain point, when you get to be a large and powerful tech company, you find yourself
in a bit of a sticky situation.
With great power comes a lot of people who really don’t want you to use that power.
These companies generally have a large stake in most aspects of your online life.
Web browsers, operating systems for your laptop and phone, the phone itself, cloud computing,
home devices, email clients, search engines, social media, you name it.
And that kind of size and influence with what is generally a huge user base is usually followed
by a lot, a lot of data.
Many products, especially free to use, personalized, consumer products are built on data.
More accurate services, better recommendations, more personalization, more data to study how
people use their sites, more effective targeted ads, tailored to you and your buying habits.
But at the same time, as these companies have been rising in power and influence, there
have been many people who have paused and said, “actually, I don’t like how everything
I do on the internet seems to be getting meticulously tracked.”
According to a 2019 Pew research study, 81% of people said they had little or no control
over the data that companies collected, and also 81% of people said that the potential
risks of collecting data about them outweighed the benefits.
And these companies know this.
As people get more and more uncomfortable with how deep this data rabbit hole goes,
these companies went to the drawing board on how to protect user’s privacy.
Easier said than done of course, since these companies are built on a business model and
a technological infrastructure that relies heavily on data, HOWEVER, Google claims to
have a solution.
A perfectly balanced method to protect its user’s privacy while also still being able
to have targeted advertisements.
Today, let’s take a deep dive into a part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, how they plan
on phasing out Third Party Cookies with their new Topics API, and generally a conversation
about privacy and whether this proposal is the right way forward.
In order to talk about why we want to get rid of third party cookies, let’s start
by talking about cookies.
Whenever you visit a website, the website has the ability to request that you save a
little bit of information onto your computer.
It’s just text, and it can be anything they want, but generally speaking, anything that
they might want to remember about your computer in the future.
For example, if you set your page to dark mode, the website can write down on your machine
that you like dark mode, and so next time you visit the site, you can show them that
information, and then they can switch you over to the dark mode page.
This is very foundational to the modern internet, because it’s also how a website knows that
you’re logged into your account.
Imagine a world for every single video you watched, every single time you wanted to subscribe,
if YouTube made you type in your username and password over and over again.
It would be frustrating and completely unusable,
so instead it stores that information on your machine, and then your browser will automatically
send back that stored info instead of having you manually typing in your password every
page you visit.
That piece of information is called a cookie.
It’s not anything complicated, it’s not code or anything, think of it like a sticker
that is slapped on you with things like your dark mode preferences or login info on it.
And like a sticker, you are free to remove it whenever you want.
Here’s the thing though, because websites use it to store passwords and authentication
and stuff, it’s important that cookies that Netflix creates can’t be read by Google
and vice versa.
Otherwise any old website could steal your credentials for any other website, which would
probably be bad.
Google Chrome, or whatever web browser you use, is in charge of making sure that only
the site who originally wrote the cookie is able to read it later down the line.
This ability to store things on your computer is a fundamental piece of the modern internet,
but over time, as the internet has become more sophisticated, it’s not just the website
you’re visiting that’s setting cookies.
Whenever you click on a link, you’re not just requesting a single web page anymore,
but dozens of different requests sent out to all sorts of tiny and varying services.
Fetching images, fonts, embedded videos, data from various servers, analytics services,
and advertisements.
And each of them have the ability to set cookies as well if they choose to do so.
Remember, only the service that set the cookies can read them.
So font servers can only read the cookies they set and not those set by an analytics
server.
However, these services are shared by many websites.
If some website, ad-player.com, were to set a cookie while you were browsing minecraft.net,
and you visit another completely unrelated website who also has invited ad-player.com
onto their website, they can read the cookie they originally set on the first site.
Remember, the rule is only the site that set the cookie can read it; there’s no restriction
on when or where they set it, so long as they were the one who originally set the cookie.
You can probably see where this is heading.
Chances are, you’ve probably heard from around the block that Third Party Cookies
can be used to track you across the web.
Well, this is exactly that.
A third party, ad-player.com, that is present on multiple websites.
Remember, they’re just writing information, and this can be completely harmless.
But they could choose to store some identifiable information, like, “You are User #374”.
That way, any time you visited a site that uses ad-player.com, this ad agency would be
able to know your ID number and slowly start to build up a profile on what kind of sites
you are visiting.
The more companies that partner with ad-player.com, the wider their ability to track you across
those sites.
And as people become more and more familiar with this kind of technology, they begin to
realize that they don’t really like the fact that certain sites are tracking their
online browsing.
Disabling third party cookies in their browsers, or sometimes getting new browsers that disable
them by default.
And perhaps they should be concerned.
Right, it’s one thing when an individual site is able to track activity on their own
website, but across websites is a whole nother level.
So, is there a solution to this?
Well, Google claims to have one.
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We all want to feel safe and secure on the internet.
That’s why Google is leading an industry-wide effort to make the web and Android private.
It's called the Privacy Sandbox Initiative.
The Privacy Sandbox Initiative.
It’s not just Google who has these sorts of programs.
Many consumer facing services, both large and small companies will tell you that they
value your privacy.
From a certain point of view, this is undoubtedly a good thing.
People became more informed about the internet over the years, voiced their concerns, and
our technology companies have been feeling the pressure to make changes to their services
and infrastructure.
Also there were new laws.
But when a company like Google advocates for privacy, it is very important for us to understand
that their conception of privacy is in fact a balance between privacy and its other business
goals.
Remember: On top of being a top search engine, Google is also an ad network.
So in many cases, they are the third party that is tracking your web behavior as they
follow you across the web for advertising purposes.
Their model of a private internet requires advertisers to still be able to serve targeted
ads while also attempting to preserve privacy.
Anyways, one of Google’s first goals in their Privacy Sandbox is to repeal and replace
third party cookies.
We should note here that with a different mindset, this is actually an incredibly trivial
problem to solve.
In order to stop third party cookies, we can just, delete the code that saves third party
cookies.
In fact, Google Chrome already has this feature.
I have third party cookies disabled right now, and many other browsers have this feature
on by default.
But the argument by Google and many others is that the key to a free and open internet
requires the ability for publishers to display targeted ads.
To strike this balance, Google Introduced its Topics API.
Actually, it first introduced FLoC, but has since then been scrapped due to the fact that
everyone thought it was a bad idea.
But hang on to that, I’ll briefly come back to this in a second.
Google Topics API as of the time of writing is the current proposal that Google hopes
to experiment with.
The core of it is this.
First off, eliminate third party cookies altogether.
Third party cookies allow large advertising networks to give you a unique ID so they can
identify you every time you visit a website that they’ve partnered with.
Instead of giving them the ability to write and read cookies that can have anything on
them, your browser will instead provide a list of topics that you might be interested
in based on the websites you have visited in the past few weeks.
Each website’s topic can be determined by their hostname using machine learning, specifically
a classifier model.
For example, basketballiscool.com could fall into the “sports” topic for example, while
apple.com (spelled correctly) would correspond to “Technology”.
Or fruits, it’s hard to say.
Every week or so, your web browser, Google Chrome, would take the websites you visited
in the past week, and gather the top 5 most common topics of websites you’ve visited.
It will then randomly choose one of these five topics for each of the last 3 weeks for
a total of 3 topics that are presented.
Because these are randomly selected from a list of 5, it means if the same user visits
the same site, that the user will have slightly different topics lists every single time,
making it harder to identify you.
Since Chrome only looks back three weeks, it means that these topics will change over
time as you visit new sites, making it harder to track you over time.
In addition, for each of the selections, there’s a 5% chance that the topic is switched to
some other completely random topic, which also adds a bit of variance to make it harder
to identify you.
We should note that these specific numbers and details may change, but putting that aside,
the core of the matter is this: No more advertising IDs, no more ad networks seeing your browsing
history.
Instead, they get a list of three topics, which essentially summarizes your browsing
history.
The actual sites never leave your machine, and the only thing that does are these topics,
which, chances are, many many people will also share.
Sounds good, right?
Soo, let’s talk about privacy.
The internet used to be a much simpler place.
The most any website owner could know was that someone somewhere viewed their website.
No more information than an author collects when you read their book.
The other thing is that privacy means different things to different people.
There are certain books, articles, websites, shows that you’re fine sharing with whoever
asks, and there are some that you aren’t.
Things that you’d rather not be used to manipulate you, or used against you, or quite
frankly, is just no one’s business.
Where that line is is something that is personal and different for anyone who’s listening.
Let’s discuss topics with a lowercase t.
One of the improvements Topics made over its predecessor FLoC was that these topics of
interest would be hand curated and in general will require a lot of thought to create a
good number of appropriate topics.
Too many topics and each topic might be too granular, and could be used to identify an
individual.
And too few topics, and they might be less useful for advertisers.
In addition, this means intentionally avoiding sensitive topics, which is definitely an important
thing.
But that brings up the question: What counts as a sensitive topic?
Peter Snyder wrote a great article about the Google Topics API, where he talks about how
there isn’t really such a thing as categorically “non-sensitive data”.
For example if your topic is “Job Hunt”, like you’re looking for a new job, in many
instances this might be information you’re okay with giving up, but it might not be something
you want your employer to know.
“Cheese and Wine” for example seems harmless enough, but perhaps some people in certain
religious or dietary communities would rather keep those topics to themselves.
This right here is the fundamental clash between some privacy advocates and plans by companies
that run on large ad networks.
There were a lot of concerns raised with the original FLoC, and to their credit, Google
was able to resolve a lot of them with their new Topics API, and I believe they will continue
to discuss and iterate and improve on their ideas.
But this right here is fundamentally unresolvable.
Everyone agrees that the end of third party cookies will be a good thing.
On one side however, privacy advocates envision an internet that protects your data and your
browsing activity.
The websites you visit collect no more data than is absolutely necessary, and don’t
try to profile you without you intentionally and explicitly giving your information to
them.
In that way, reading an article on the internet would be more or less no different than reading
a physical newspaper or a magazine in the safety of your home.
Google should not determine what topics you consider sensitive.
Only you determine that.
On the other side is Google.
Google believes that the pathway to an internet with services that are free and open to everyone
requires data.
Google search engine, chrome, gmail, drive, YouTube, Maps, is built on top of ads, but
it’s not just that.
News pages run on ad revenue as well.
This channel plays ads, and I’m sure many of the non-YouTube Premium viewers enjoy the
free content you get on this service, or on Twitch, or TikTok or anywhere else.
Google believes this is the compromise: A system that gives advertisers enough data
to still target ads, while preventing them from tracking your entire browsing history.
I also think it’s important to note that this isn’t just an individual privacy issue.
Look, chances are if you made it this far into this video, you’re generally interested
in tech and privacy.
You likely already have or at some point in the future will take care of being safe and
secure in this digital age.
There are plenty of web browsers that have third party cookies disabled by default.
Google Chrome itself allows you to turn off third party cookies, something I do myself,
and they say they’ll allow you to opt out of Topics as well.
And on an individual level, that’s enough.
Find a different browser or set the settings to your liking.
But this isn’t just about one issue, or any given individual.
This is a conversation about what we want our internet to look like.
I’m less so concerned about myself than about someone like my parents, or my friends
who aren’t really that into technology.
The decisions Google makes, for better or worse, affect a lot of people, and they’ll
have a lot of influence on what the internet looks like.
One of the things that is most important to me is consent, rather, informed consent.
People should be able to understand the technology they’re using, and should be able to easily
opt in or out depending on their own values.
But when you have this kind of technology with benefits and costs that affect everyone,
it becomes all the more important that we discuss these issues and what direction we
ultimately want to go in.
One of the goals of this channel is technological literacy.
If I can communicate to you technology well enough for you to help you form your opinions,
and make decisions about your life, then I feel like that has been accomplished.
Although I think there’s been a lot of progress in communicating these ideas, I believe it
needs to go further.
If I were to guess, if I ask some random people on the street about their thoughts of Topics
or FLoC, they probably won’t be able to tell you what those are.
I value privacy.
Enough so that I’m willing to donate to nonprofits or pay for services to help protect
it.
However I also know that many people make a lot less money than I do.
Privacy shouldn’t necessarily be exclusive to those who can afford it, but instead be
a right for everyone.
In addition, I don’t think you should need a degree or watch tech videos in your free
time to have your privacy protected.
I get that there’s a tradeoff here, and I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand.
Plenty of creators rely on ad revenue, and so less effective ads directly means less
income for them.
One of the major reasons I created a Patreon and am so thankful for everyone’s support
is because I wanted to have a model that didn’t entirely run on ads, and so far it’s been
pretty successful, even though I still receive ad revenue.
I also don’t claim to be an expert or have all the solutions.
I’d like to imagine a world where we can both have privacy and also a free and open
internet.
Fund creators and content and services that are valuable to us, without necessarily having
to flush our privacy down the drain.
And I’ve seen ideas on how that might look, directly supporting services and content being
one of them.
Is it actually possible?
Hard to say, since I can’t see the future.
Like I said before, the thing I can do now is to make sure as many people understand
their technological world, and the tradeoffs that are being made so that you don’t wake
up one day to an unrecognizable, unfixable world.
Whatever our pathway forward, whatever direction our internet goes, we need to make that decision
while being informed and knowing the tradeoffs, and we need to make it together based on our
values, and not just the values of a handful of companies.
Thanks for watching everyone.
I want to give a special thanks to some of our new MVP Patreon supporters.
Thank you to Jim W. and BarelyAwake for being MVPs of this channel, and you’ll get to
see their name in the plaque up there for being founders.
And an extra super special thanks to Allen L. and Felix for their Alpha I support.
Look, this channel is built on supporters like them, and I’m working on building a
community of people who really want to support the work we do!
In fact, it was a Founder who actually originally suggested this subject a while back!
So it’s very appreciated, thank you so much!
And if you’d like to join them, head over to my Patreon in the description!
Until next time, and remember, aim to understand the technology you use.