If you’re among the billions of people using Chrome, you’ll need to quit, especially if you’re using Google’s browser on an Apple device. Friday data revelations and “horrifying“New tracking technology should serve as a serious warning that it’s time to change. That’s what you need to know.
Why it’s time to leave Chrome
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While Facebook has taken a liking to the security and privacy of data in recent weeks, fighting Apple for the right to collect data from its users, Google has taken a smoother, more subtle approach. Delay privacy tags until Facebook has taken issue, and announced significant new changes to its flagship Chrome browser.
Google says it wants a “privacy first” website. And, on the surface, killing the dreaded cookie and cracking down on tracking between sites is an important step in the right direction. But, as they say in the movies, if you want to know what’s really going on, “follow the money.” And with Google that means data-driven advertising.
When it comes to this data collection, the gorillas in the industry are Google and Facebook. Both technology giants generate most of their advertising revenue, although this is not always the case with Google’s range of platforms, services and operating systems. But Google’s more than $ 100 billion in advertising revenue tells you what you need to know.
This was clearly illustrated when Google finally released a privacy tag for Chrome in the Apple App Store. Google’s browser collects more data than Safari or Edge or Firefox, and worse, is the only one of the four that doesn’t bother to collect data that isn’t linked to users’ identities. It is a philosophy, a business model.
Apple Privacy Tags: Chrome vs. Rivals.
Apple / @UKZak privacy tags
“It doesn’t become a billion-dollar company without grabbing as much data as it can make revenue,” Ija Thornton-Trump of Cyjax CISO told me last month, just after (really) privacy, DuckDuckGo warned that “Google doesn’t care about protecting user privacy. They care about protecting their surveillance business model. If they really cared about privacy, they would only stop spying on billions of people.”
Choosing a browser is a very subjective issue. Ease of use, speed, features, seamless cross-platform options are factors. And Chrome has spent more than anyone making sure your user experience is as catchy as it is. But unlike Apple and Microsoft, the other two tech giants in the browser business, Google doesn’t generate its revenue from products, it generates its revenue from data, your data, ad-targeted.
So you are about to receive a confusing and conflicting message about how all this is reconciled. How Google intends to protect your privacy while extracting your data to sell you more, or rather, to allow your business customers to sell you more.
Unfortunately, this will become very confusing. Google is replacing cookies with federated cohort learning (FLoC), which is now being tested without the knowledge of affected Chrome users. And, while I’m sure this wasn’t designed to be confusing, it seems to be Python when explained. An FLoC is basically a group of similar users, as it is considered an algorithm that is behind the browsers of these users.
Simply put, this secret and hidden algorithm keeps track of the sites you visit and your online activities to assign you to a group. You won’t be followed as a 45-year-old accountant, John Smith, 101 Acacia Avenue, but the algorithm will be pretty specific about your interests and will easily share it with websites. Using the web, warns DuckDuckGo, will be “like entering a store where they already know everything about you.”
In response to this story, Google told me that “we strongly believe that FLoC is better for user privacy compared to individualized cross-site tracking that prevails today. The FLoC source test is an early step. but important towards the goal of Privacy Sandbox of an open website that is private by default and economically sustainable ”.
With data collection and tracking, history tells us that we need to consider the unintended consequences of even well-intentioned developments. This week, Facebook has blamed the user-centered convenience behind its latest data setback, with the exploitation of this function by “bad actors”. Therefore, the fear with FLoC is that anonymized group identifiers will be recognized and interpreted soon, that your IP address will be captured and linked.
And so now the risk is that a third party may link your unique IP address to your anonymous FLoC identifier to find out more about you than you should, to take advantage of the power of this secret algorithm that works behind the scenes of the browser; the FLoC is not on a Google Cloud server, it is on Chrome itself. As EFF warns, “if a crawler starts with your FLoC cohort, it should only distinguish your browser from thousands (instead of a few hundred million).”
When browsing the web, bring out the most intimate details about yourself. Dating sites, personal services and worse. And while each FLoC only tracks last week’s online activity, before resetting it, you shouldn’t track it that way.
Google has already come under fire by the obfuscation around your so-called “incognito” navigation and with FLoC, most of you will know nothing about it. EFF warns that “a change has been silently changed in millions of instances of Google Chrome: these browsers will begin to categorize their users according to behavior, and then share group tags with third-party crawlers and advertisers on the web.”
And while I’m sure that as this release reaches mainstream, there will be easy ways to change a switch and turn it off, it will be exactly the same as with cookies. You will be constantly encouraged to enable all backstage crawlers.
EFF warns that “Chrome’s origin test for FLoC has been deployed to millions of random Chrome users without warning and much less consent. Although FLoC eventually intends to replace the tracking cookies, during the test, it will give fans access to more information on topics. “
Google told me that “as implemented in the source test, FLoC uses much less data than can already be accessed using third-party cookies, and FLoC is designed to prevent websites from being reverse engineered. ‘an individual’s browsing activity’. But privacy advocates have flatly denied this.
And also to Apple. There is a raw irony right now, as we have never had more information available about the exploitation of our private information, the good and bad actors when it comes to tracking us, the tools we can use. to protect us. And yet, as has been shown with FLoC, the other side of this equation is that data collectors have never been so sophisticated. It is a running battle.
Next year, Chrome will abandon the traditional cookies that have been used for years to track users across the web. This will make the advertising industry a turning point. The problem is that Google is on both sides, as a platform and advertising vending machine. The risk is that this will put too much control in the hands of Google.
Apple is on the right side of this battle: it has no direct interest in fueling the advertising industry, although it is clearly not immune to data collection or advertising. But Apple has adopted privacy as a USP and has come to grips with Facebook and the advertising industry with cracking down on app crawlers and browsers and these privacy tags.
So we came to a fork in the road, a pivot point. Most people who read this will not want to opt for uber applications and private platforms I recognize. As good as DuckDuckGo, as good as Signal, as good as ProtonMail, you’ll want to use a main browser, WhatsApp or iMessage, and standard email apps.
And it’s okay. Because Safari is a perfect compromise. If you use the Apple ecosystem, it works seamlessly between devices and already has built-in anti-tracking technology. In addition, it will even store your passwords and alert you when one has been reused or infringed. And since it’s Apple, you’re likely to trust it more than other platforms and use it more than you could with a dedicated password manager.
It makes no sense for Apple to secure your data and privacy by creating a walled garden around your online experience, if you then install and use Chrome on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Simply put, don’t let the fox into the chicken coop. “Right now,” says DuckDuckGo, “FLoC is only in Google Chrome and no other browser provider has expressed its intention or even interest in implementing it.”
As I mentioned before, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has stated that “we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content (such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Photos) for advertising purposes, period.” But Chrome is not on this list. Therefore, you need to consider its true value to Google.
Using your fingerprint to identify yourself as a single user is called a fingerprint. EFF warns that “fingerprints are remarkably difficult to stop. Browsers such as Safari and Tor have been involved in attrition wars for years against trackers, sacrificing large expanses of their own feature sets in order to reduce fingerprint attack surfaces. EFF warns that FLoC is “a new fingerprint risk” and that Google should not put that risk in place “until it finds out how to deal with existing ones.”
EFF has launched a website where you can check if your Chrome browser has FLoC enabled. Clearly, this is only relevant for Chrome, and even if it’s not enabled now, this could happen at any time without you realizing it.
Try FLoC for Chrome
EFF
Hopefully, with enough pressure, Google will ensure that there are some protections added to your FLoC deployment. The company told me that “if a user has decided to block third-party cookies with the current version of Chrome, they will not be included in the source test. In April, we’ll be introducing a control in Chrome settings that users can use to disable inclusion in FLoC and other Sandbox privacy proposals. “
As I’ve said several times, if we don’t reward the apps and platforms that protect and respect our data and move away from the ones we don’t, we send a message that it’s okay to harvest at will. If the disclosure of Google data collection didn’t take you from Chrome to Safari (or Firefox or DuckDuckGo or Brave or even Edge), stealthily deploying these hidden FLoCs should do it now.