Google probably gets data both within the sandbox and outside the sandbox. But outside the sandbox, probably so do parties with worse privacy practices than Google, such as actually selling your data instead of just letting their internal ad systems use your data so that advertisers can reach you with targeted ads, or such as not letting you as effectively delete your data as Google does.
(Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, but not for over 8 years, and I’m certainly not speaking for them here. My Google job never included anything relevant to this comment, except doing roughly 1-2 years of standard SRE/devops/sysadmin work for a now-decommissioned acquired product in the publisher-side display ads yield management space, ending roughly a decade ago.)
> just letting their internal ad systems use your data so that advertisers can reach you with targeted ads
Your distancing yourself from your former employer's practices is appreciated but Google monopolizing click and all other web usage data isn't any better than keeping those for themselves from an antitrust PoV (as opposed to selling the data under FRAND terms).
There's no way around taking Chrome development and monopoly influence on web standardization away from Google as one outcome of ongoing antitrust lawsuits.
> Your distancing yourself from your former employer's practices is appreciated but Google monopolizing click and all other web usage data isn't any better than keeping those for themselves from an antitrust PoV (as opposed to selling the data under FRAND terms).
I’m comparing practices from the perspective of privacy, not antitrust, since that is the frame in which we were discussing, and with which the original submitted NOYB article was concerned.
I don’t like monopoly power in the advertising industry any more than you do, and Google is not an exception to that. But I don’t want the fix to any Google advertising monopoly to be forcing them to share user data on FRAND terms. Not only would that likely violate privacy law in Europe and elsewhere in the world, it would reduce my data’s privacy protections to what results from the worst privacy practices among anyone who buys the data from Google. Yes, that’s far worse than what Google currently does.
> There's no way around taking Chrome development and monopoly influence on web standardization away from Google as one outcome of ongoing antitrust lawsuits.
If authorities like those in Europe or the US decide that antitrust violations by Google warrant those remedies, I have no personal objection. But I would object to any anti-monopoly measures that effectively destroy the privacy of the profile Google has built on me, such as mandatory FRAND licensing of that data. At least I can delete the data when it’s just the one data custodian, and one which properly implements and tests data deletion process more than many companies.
(Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, but not for over 8 years, and I’m certainly not speaking for them here. My Google job never included anything relevant to this comment, except doing roughly 1-2 years of standard SRE/devops/sysadmin work for a now-decommissioned acquired product in the publisher-side display ads yield management space, ending roughly a decade ago.)