| My friend Jake runs an analytics company. He's faced enormous challenges due to Google's "privacy" policies... Google is removing nearly all access to user data, they don't even like you looking at the user agent string (which issues a warning)... not to mention its impossible to know about search traffic and even referring urls. Meanwhile Google has access to all this data, so he tells me all this is just gaslighting so they can illicitly protect their monopoly on web data. |
1. Roll out stuff they brand as “privacy respecting” that actually collects data for their own use.
2. Brand anything that would give competitors access to that data (third party cookies, user agent strings, etc) as a threat to user privacy.
3. Lock all of that stuff down so that nobody can access it (“we’re protecting you!”)
4. I don’t think we need the ???, it’s just straight to profit, via monopoly over the data.
The brilliant/terrible thing about this is that third party cookie tracking is not great so it’s hard to set up a defensible argument where leaving things as they are is the better alternative. Apple and others have been waging a war on third party tracking for years now, and pushing public opinion in that direction, and it seems to me that Google is playing 4D chess here and using it against them (and frankly, the entire internet).