← Back to context

Comment by scarface_74

3 years ago

Are we suppose to feel bad for your friend’s analytic company?

I took it more as an anecdote to show how Google is intentionally using its size and influence to engage in anticompetitive practices by forcing the adtech industry to standardize on technologies that only Google can use effectively.

More of a "be upset with Google" than a "feel bad for my friend" kind of thing

  • The privacy preserving ads tech has been around a while and a lot developed outside of Google and Meta. I made a stab at it while an intern at Mozilla, and we basically succeeded at the very easy part of accounting. Training the bandit is a lot harder.

    Also the adtech industry in it's current form is harmful to users. First of it exploits tracking vectors. Secondly it's a malware distribution technique second to none.

You're supposed to feel bad for people who use Chrome.

That is about the entire desktop user base btw.

We all suffer when competition is stifled.

  • The market for private user data should not even exist. So the call for more competition in that area is absurd.

    • I don't think folks are arguing for such a market. Rather that Google owning the market is also bad, maybe even worse.

  • it's not stifling any competition. the data that used to be in the user-agent header is now in the sec-ch-ua header. servers can set response headers to request more information if they want it, assuming the website makes more than one http request, which every website does.