Google Cookies: Dancing Around
August 28, 2019
In my Google Version 2: The Calculating Predator, I summarized a number of Google innovations which embed tracking. One of the more interesting approaches was for Google to become the Internet; that is, when you run a query, you are accessing the Internet as it exists within Google. (If you want more information, write benkent2020 @ yahoo dot com. I sell a set of “fair copies” of these original books I submitted to a now defunct publisher in Brexitland. There are some minor typos and a dropped graphic or two, but the info is there.)
I wrote the Google monographs in 2003 to 2008.
The tracking functions, the walled garden, the Google version of the Internet — each of these were in place more than 15 years ago. Therefore, any modification of Google’s cookies polices and the associated technology like Ramanathan Guha’s and Alon Halevy’s innovations is a very big job. Given the present state of the Google architecture, I am not sure that the existing crew of 100,000 plus could make such modifications without having many Google services break. “Services”, however, are not what users experience. The services are the internal operations that ensure ads get displayed, the click stream data are collected, the internal components have access to fresh user behavior data, and the public facing outputs like search results, “did you mean”, and even the “I’m feeling lucky” are in line with what Google’s financial demands require. Remember: Ads have to be displayed and users induced to click on them to make the Yahoo-GoTo-Overture inspired system function.
Cookies, including the special DoubleClick variety and the garden variety “expire a long time in the future” type are important to the Google system. If you can’t find content in an index, the reason may be that the site’s content is no longer generating clicks. Indexing becomes more important with each passing day. How does one control costs? Well, those cookies and beacons are helpful. No signals of click love, then less frequent or zero indexing. Thus, indexing costs can be managed which is almost impossible if a spider just follows links, changed content, and new information. Where is an index to the content on “beat sites” like Beatstars.com? Answer: The content is not indexed if our recent test queries are accurate. (I know, “What’s beat content? Not in this write up, gentle reader, not in this write up.)
Against this background I want to call your attention to “Deconstructing Google’s Excuses on Tracking Protection.” The write up is a reasonable analysis of Google saying that it wants to be more respectful of user’s privacy.
DarkCyber thought the summary of cookies was good. Here’s the passage we circled:
Our high-level points are:
1) Cookie blocking does not undermine web privacy. Google’s claim to the contrary is privacy gas lighting.
2) There is little trustworthy evidence on the comparative value of tracking-based advertising.
3) Google has not devised an innovative way to balance privacy and advertising; it is latching onto prior approaches that it previously disclaimed as impractical.
4) Google is attempting a punt to the web standardization process, which will at best result in years of delay.
My concern is that this type of write up does not specifically state what Google is doing. The use of the phrase “gas lighting” and the invocation of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are very trendy.
Unfortunately, plain talk is needed. With Google search the primary conduit of what is “important”, the game is no longer one of cookies.
Exactly what can a government or a committee do to address more than 15 years of engineering specifically designed to track people, cluster individuals into groups, predict what the majority of those in a statistically valid cluster want, and make sense of individual user behavior cues?
One step may be that writers and analysts adopt a more direct, blunt way of explaining Google/DoubleClick tracking. The reason individuals do not speak out is that there is what I call “Google fright”. It affects news release services. It affects analysts. It affects “real journalists.” It affects Google’s would be government watch dogs.
Who doesn’t want a Google mouse pad or T shirt? Darned few. Fear of Google may be a factor to consider when reading about DarkCyber’s favorite ad supported, Web search system.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2019
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