I might have misunderstood this but is Android really trying to push this as tracking as a privacy upgrade, simply because it let’s us choose which of our interests we want advertisers to have access to?

  • voxel
    223·
    4 months ago

    well it’s an improvement…
    basically the tracking is still there but runs locally on your phone, so google only knows this

    someone with ip 1.2.3.4 is interested in sports, cats and videogames and is looking to purchase a new monitor

    (and the info is sent with every ad request, statelessly) google promises they won’t associate these requests with ip addresses, but I won’t trust them.

    instead of a full log like:

    user x with tracking id 12345 visited catworld.com at 10:34:56 PM and stayed there for 35 seconds
    user x with tracking id 12345 made a purchase on website shoptech.com and was scrolling through the monitors page for 10 minutes.

    it’s still tracking but it sucks less i guess…
    and making it a default is probably a great move

    (I’d rather opt out of any form of tracking tho)

    • heisenbug4242@lemmy.world
      9·
      4 months ago

      And since only Google knows it strengthens their data monopoly even further, as if it wasn’t bad enough already.

      • MiDaBa@lemmy.ml
        11·
        4 months ago

        I’m split on this concept. Assuming we can’t get away from tracking I would prefer a company like Google over a company like Meta. Google doesn’t sell your data, they just serve ads based on what data they have. Meta and other data brokers will sell your data to whoever ponies up the cash. I’m not happy about being tracked either way. I just recognize one system is considerably worse than the other. Also, if (and this is a big if) Google honors your request to delete your data then I believe it would be even less of a concern. Right now I have my Google data set to auto delete after three months. Ideally that would be enough data to help with traffic suggestions etc while serving up relevant ads but not enough to build an invasive profile. Realisticly we need more laws outlining how our data can be used and ensuring that it’s not retained in ANY form after a set period of time or when it’s deletion is requested.