It's a big year for the oozing creep of corporate paternalism and ad-tracking technology online.
Google and its subsidiary companies have tightened their grips on the throat of internet innovation, all while employing the now familiar tactic of marketing these things as beneficial for users.
Here we'll review the most significant changes this year, all emphasizing the point that browser privacy tools are more important than ever.
Chrome, the most popular web browser by all measurements, recently announced the official death date for Manifest V2, hastening the reign of its janky successor, Manifest V3. We've been complaining about this since the start, but here's the gist: the finer details of MV3 have gotten somewhat better over time.
What security benefits it has are bought by limiting what all extensions can do.
Chrome could invest in a more robust extension review process.
Put bluntly: Chrome, a browser built by an advertising company, has positioned itself as the gatekeeper for in-browser privacy tools, the sole arbiter of how they should be designed.
For what it's worth, Apple's Safari browser imposes similar restrictions to allegedly protect Safari users from malicious extensions.
While it's important to protect users from said malicious extensions, it's equally important to honor their privacy.
It limits tracking so it's only done by a single powerful party, Chrome itself, who then gets to dole out its learnings to advertisers that are willing to pay.
This is just another step in transforming the browser from a user agent to an advertising agent.
Privacy Badger now disables the Topics API by default.
The blocking message gave users a countdown until they would no longer be able to use the site unless they disabled their ad-blockers.
YouTube, a Google owned company which saw its own all-time high in third quarter advertising revenue, has no equivocal announcement laden with deceptive language for this one.
If you're on Chrome or a Chromium-based browser, expect YouTube to be broken unless you turn off your ad-blocker.
User security shouldn't be bought by forfeiting privacy.
All this bad decision-making drives home how important privacy tools are.
It's not just that Privacy Badger is built to protect the disempowered users, that it's a plug-n-play tool working quietly behind the scenes to halt the tracking industry, but that it exists in an ecosystem of other like minded privacy projects that complement each other.
Until we have comprehensive privacy protections in place, until corporate tech stops abusing our desires to not be snooped on, privacy tools must be empowered to make up for these harms.
Users deserve the right to choose what privacy means to them, not have that decision made by an advertising company like Google.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:43:06 +0000