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By Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan.

Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.

Our high-level points are:

1) Cookie blocking does not undermine web privacy. Google’s claim to the contrary is privacy gaslighting.

2) There is little trustworthy evidence on the comparative value of tracking-based advertising.

3) Google has not devised an innovative way to balance privacy and advertising; it is latching onto prior approaches that it previously disclaimed as impractical.

4) Google is attempting a punt to the web standardization process, which will at best result in years of delay.

What follows is a reproduction of excerpts from yesterday’s announcement, annotated with our comments.

Technology that publishers and advertisers use to make advertising even more relevant to people is now being used far beyond its original design intent – to a point where some data practices don’t match up to user expectations for privacy.

Google is trying to thread a needle here, implying that some level of tracking is consistent with both the original design intent for web technology and user privacy expectations. Neither is true.

If the benchmark is original design intent, let’s be clear: cookies were not supposed to enable third-party tracking, and browsers were supposed to block third-party cookies. We know this because the authors of the original cookie technical specification said so (RFC 2109, Section 4.3.5).

Similarly, if the benchmark is user privacy expectations, let’s be clear: study after study has demonstrated that users don’t understand and don’t want the pervasive web tracking that occurs today.

Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.

This is clearly a reference to Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, which we think are laudable privacy features. We’ll get to the unintended consequences claim.

First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy by encouraging opaque techniques such as fingerprinting. With fingerprinting, developers have found ways to use tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed to generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong.



To appreciate the absurdity of this argument, imagine the local police saying, “We see that our town has a pickpocketing problem. But if we crack down on pickpocketing, the pickpocketers will just switch to muggings. That would be even worse. Surely you don’t want that, do you?”



Concretely, there are several things wrong with Google’s argument. First, while fingerprinting is indeed a privacy invasion, that’s an argument for taking additional steps to protect users from it, rather than throwing up our hands in the air. Indeed, Apple and Mozilla have already taken steps to mitigate fingerprinting, and they are continuing to develop anti-fingerprinting protections.



Second, protecting consumer privacy is not like protecting security—just because a clever circumvention is technically possible does not mean it will be widely deployed. Firms face immense reputational and legal pressures against circumventing cookie blocking. Google’s own privacy fumble in 2012 offers a perfect illustration of our point: Google implemented a workaround for Safari’s cookie blocking; it was spotted (in part by one of us), and it had to settle enforcement actions with the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. Afterward, Google didn’t double down—it completely backed away from tracking cookies for Safari users. Based on peer-reviewed research, including our own, we’re confident that fingerprinting continues to represent a small proportion of overall web tracking. And there’s no evidence of an increase in the use of fingerprinting in response to other browsers deploying cookie blocking.



Third, even if a large-scale shift to fingerprinting is inevitable (which it isn’t), cookie blocking still provides meaningful protection against third parties that stick with conventional tracking cookies. That’s better than the defeatist approach that Google is proposing.



This isn’t the first time that Google has used disingenuous arguments to suggest that a privacy protection will backfire. We’re calling this move privacy gaslighting, because it’s an attempt to persuade users and policymakers that an obvious privacy protection—already adopted by Google’s competitors—isn’t actually a privacy protection.

Second, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web. Many publishers have been able to continue to invest in freely accessible content because they can be confident that their advertising will fund their costs. If this funding is cut, we are concerned that we will see much less accessible content for everyone. Recent studies have shown that when advertising is made less relevant by removing cookies, funding for publishers falls by 52% on average.



The overt paternalism here is disappointing. Google is taking the position that it knows better than users—if users had all the privacy they want, they wouldn’t get the free content they want more. So no privacy for users.



As for the “recent studies” that Google refers to, that would be one paragraph in one blog post presenting an internal measurement conducted by Google. There is a glaring omission of the details of the measurement that are necessary to have any sort of confidence in the claim. And as long as we’re comparing anecdotes, the international edition of the New York Times recently switched from tracking-based behavioral ads to contextual and geographic ads—and it did not experience any decrease in advertising revenue.



Independent research doesn’t support Google’s claim either: the most recent academic study suggests that tracking only adds about 4% to publisher revenue. This is a topic that merits much more research, and it’s disingenuous for Google to cherry pick its own internal measurement. And it’s important to distinguish the economic issue of whether tracking benefits advertising platforms like Google (which it unambiguously does) from the economic issue of whether tracking benefits publishers (which is unclear).



Starting with today’s announcements, we will work with the web community to develop new standards that advance privacy, while continuing to support free access to content. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve started sharing our preliminary ideas for a Privacy Sandbox – a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users, but user data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only. Our goal is to create a set of standards that is more consistent with users’ expectations of privacy.



There is nothing new about these ideas. Privacy preserving ad targeting has been an active research area for over a decade. One of us (Mayer) repeatedly pushed Google to adopt these methods during the Do Not Track negotiations (about 2011-2013). Google’s response was to consistently insist that these approaches are not technically feasible. For example: “To put it simply, client-side frequency capping does not work at scale.” We are glad that Google is now taking this direction more seriously, but a few belated think pieces aren’t much progress.



We are also disappointed that the announcement implicitly defines privacy as confidentiality. It ignores that, for some users, the privacy concern is behavioral ad targeting—not the web tracking that enables it. If an ad uses deeply personal information to appeal to emotional vulnerabilities or exploits psychological tendencies to generate a purchase, then that is a form of privacy violation—regardless of the technical details.



We are following the web standards process and seeking industry feedback on our initial ideas for the Privacy Sandbox. While Chrome can take action quickly in some areas (for instance, restrictions on fingerprinting) developing web standards is a complex process, and we know from experience that ecosystem changes of this scope take time. They require significant thought, debate, and input from many stakeholders, and generally take multiple years.



Apple and Mozilla have tracking protection enabled, by default, today. And Apple is already testing privacy-preserving ad measurement. Meanwhile, Google is talking about a multi-year process for a watered-down form of privacy protection. And even that is uncertain—advertising platforms dragged out the Do Not Track standardization process for over six years, without any meaningful output. If history is any indication, launching a standards process is an effective way for Google to appear to be doing something on web privacy, but without actually delivering.

In closing, we want to emphasize that the Chrome team is full of smart engineers passionate about protecting their users, and it has done incredible work on web security. But it is unlikely that Google can provide meaningful web privacy while protecting its business interests, and Chrome continues to fall far behind Safari and Firefox. We find this passage from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to be apt:



“Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”



It is disappointing—but regrettably unsurprising—that the Chrome team is cloaking Google’s business priorities in disingenuous technical arguments.

Thanks to Ryan Amos, Kevin Borgolte, and Elena Lucherini for providing comments on a draft.



