On big tech and privacy

There aren’t many buzzwords you hear from big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google these days than “privacy.” Ghostery, a browser vendor focused on ad blocking and privacy, doesn’t mean what they mean by privacy when they use that word.

“They’re all leveraging privacy in many ways to their advantage,” Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz said on a recent TechFirst podcast.

But obviously, I think privacy should be defined from the user’s point of view, like… that’s all it matters.

For example, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Privacy Policy states that companies won’t share information they’ve collected about you without your consent with other companies … without companies collecting information about you, period. Google’s often delayed third-party cookie termination (delayed again, soon) prevents cross-site tracking, which is good for privacy, but never hurts Google because Google has a first-party relationship with you. And (besides Facebook) Facebook’s insane list of privacy settings that can see everything about you, but won’t protect you from the big social network that gives you everything.

So talk, talk, talk… we’re all aloof on the web, at least in terms of our personal data and digital behavior.

“Some of the data points out that every American is going out 750 times a day, and Europeans are at … 360 times a day,” Schmetz says.

In other words, GDPR, the giant piece of legislation that forced more mouse clicks (to accept or deny cookies) than any other law in history, only succeeded in halving Europe’s data privacy vulnerability.

The irony, Schmetz says, is that all this data collection to make ads more relevant and effective isn’t actually doing the job.

“I don’t think we’d lose as much in advertising or machine learning if people collected data in a way that didn’t expose their users’ lives,” Schmets said. “Of course it can be done. We’ve proven it many times, you know, academically, etc. It is workable. It doesn’t just work for no reason. Neither consumers nor governments or anyone else is pushing in that direction.

There is evidence that publishers, especially news outlets, can generate more revenue by ditching adtech targeting (which each takes a share of the revenue) and simply enabling contextual ads that don’t require personal information. For example, the Irish Civil Liberties Council cites a Norwegian news agency that quadrupled revenue for contextual advertising in 12 months and a Dutch publisher that increased tracking-based advertising revenue by 149% in 12 months.

And Google’s Privacy Sandbox is still a work-in-progress and not widely released technology that’s meant to enable device targeting and relevant ads to reach the right people without taking their data, exposing their data, or compromising their identities.

However, it’s not clear that highly specialized smaller brands can adequately use contextual targeting to reach large audiences… even if publishers are better at it.

Regardless, Schmetz says Google is actually moving to crack privacy-enhancing tools by changing how extensions work in the Chrome browser.

“They have a lot of different policies, but what you’re saying about anti-tracking basically tells us you can block a request, but you can’t edit it,” Schmetz said. But only if you can block … the site will not work. And you can’t remove accounts like we do at Ghostery: “Look, the web works the way it’s supposed to, it’s just that your credentials haven’t expired.”

Meaning: The Ghostery extension on Chrome cannot change the data that the browser gives to a website about your personal information. The extension can only block it, which means the website you want to use won’t work.

Understandably, Google has concerns: A browser that can read and manipulate the data it sends and receives could be a good tool for withdrawing money from banks or crypto from users’ wallets in the wrong hands.

Still, Schmetz has a point:

“The truth of the matter is that Google has monopolized browsing, because they know that Edge is using Chromium as a base.” “Firefox isn’t as strong as it used to be and gets all of its revenue from Google. And Google now feels like they can squeeze the extension ecosystem.”

This is what Europe’s new Digital Markets Act can offer, as Google dominates a number of areas: search, email, browsers and more. The DMA may force a disbandment, and that will be a challenge for Google over the next few years. Apple is not immune: it owns the iPhone and iOS and the App Store, controlling what happens on the platform and who can access it.

Big Tech in general – Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft as well as Google and Apple – may face similar problems, many of which revolve around data.

Data is a wonderful thing, but it has its own challenges, says Schmett.

“The data sets under construction are a bit of 21st century nuclear waste, aren’t they? Like… nuclear power is great, but it’s a waste of waste, and the web and machine learning are great, but all this data is a waste of data.” It has and it really shouldn’t be there.

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