Mozilla engineer Martin Thomson reveals they've been collaborating with Meta (formerly Facebook) on new technology that can measure "conversions" from advertising while still preserving privacy. The proposed new technology is called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.

Use of Google Analytics has now been found to breach European Union privacy laws in France -- after a similar decision was reached in Austria last month. The French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, said today that an unnamed local website's use of Google Analytics is non-compliant with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- breaching Article 44 which covers personal data transfers outside the bloc to so-called third countries which are not considered to have essentially equivalent privacy protections. The U.S. fails this critical equivalence test on account of having sweeping surveillance laws which do not provide non-U.S. citizens with any way to know whether their data is being acquired, how it's being used or to seek redress for any misuse.

When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to solve a pressing problem on the early web: Websites had lousy memories. Every time a user loaded a new page, a website would treat them like a stranger it had never seen before. That made it impossible to build basic web features we take for granted today, like the shopping carts that follow us from page to page across e-commerce sites.

Within two years, advertisers learned ways to essentially hack cookies to do exactly what Montulli had tried to avoid: follow people around the internet. Eventually, they created the system of cookie-based ad targeting we have today. Twenty-seven years later, Montulli has some misgivings about how his invention has been used—but he has doubts about whether the alternatives will be any better.

Meta states in an SEC filing it is considering leaving Europe if it can no longer exchange data from European users with the United States, following the Schrems II decision. It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices).

In the meantime Meta writes that it does not plan to withdraw from Europe.

Pop-up notifications are often annoying. For Meta, one in Apple's iOS operating system, which powers iPhones, is a particular headache. On February 2nd Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told investors that privacy-focused changes to iOS, including the "ask app not to track" notification, would cost the company around $10 billion in 2022. That revelation, along with growing competition and sluggish growth in user numbers, helped to prompt a 23% plunge in Meta's share price and showed Apple's might. But what did Apple actually do, and why was it so costly?

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google's controversial project for replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into groups of users with comparable interests, is dead. In its place, Google today announced a new proposal: Topics.

In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ("Datenschutzbehörde" or "DSB") has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. This is the first decision on the 101 model complaints filed by noyb in the wake of the so-called "Schrems II" decision.

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it's possible to use Facebook's targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook's platform assigns them.

DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, Protonmail and others say "businesses can thrive without privacy-invasive practices" and advertising can be done without spying on users.

A compelling Apple ad promoting the new privacy feature for "Do not track" in iOS.

Interesting perspective:

Apple has brazenly, in broad daylight, stormed into the Bank of Facebook, looted its most precious resource, and, camouflaged under the noble cause of giving privacy controls to the consumer, fled the scene.

It seems that in the United States, at least, app developers and advertisers who rely on targeted mobile advertising for revenue are seeing their worst fears realized: Analytics data published this week suggests that US users choose to opt out of tracking 96 percent of the time in the wake of iOS 14.5.

Neeva, a Silicon-Valley-based startup building “ad-free private search”, without a public product yet, apparently has raised $77.5 million so far according to Crunchbase. They seem to have had the inside track at Greylock — good for them — with a very “fundable” entrepreneur at the helm, but nevertheless this is not a small amount for what must be pre-customer, pre-revenue or close to it focusing entirely on privacy with a $5/month subscription business model.

Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model: Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is potentially the most harmful of those new technologies.
read also: article on TechCrunch, Github W3C - Improving Web Advertising Business Group, and Google's framing as Privacy Sandbox

“If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.”

The way people are tracked online has been a cat-and-mouse game between the biggest browsers and the ad industry for years. Every time the industry found a way to claw its way back from the inventory blackouts caused by Google and Apple blocking cookies, it was hit by another curveball.

The UK’s data watchdog is facing a legal challenge after it took the decision to quietly close a complaint against the adtech industry’s high velocity background trading of personal data. The legal challenge was reported earlier by Politico.

Some Banking Websites Have Third Party Trackers on Login Pages. Just like the danger of malicious code slipping into ads on mainstream sites, the presence of third party javascript trackers on the login page of the bank means there are increased risk of privacy compromise or worse.

The linked Privacy Policy in the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone’s website is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In it the word “advertising” appears 68 times. Adjectives modifying it include “targeted,” “personalized,” “tailored,” “cookie-based,” “behavioral” and “interest-based.”

As soon as 2020, the media industry could find itself with its main monetization channel shut down, yet few seem to be working on an alternative. The seeming inaction of most media owners, despite continuing and specific warnings from regulators, is dangerous and hard to comprehend.

An interesting development shared by the UK Information Commissioner.