Google Chrome Browser Privacy Plan Investigated in UK
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Google Chrome browser privacy plan investigated in UK:
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Google's plan could have a "significant impact" on news websites and the digital advertising market.
It had already raised concerns that publishers' profits could sink if they were unable to run personalised ads.
But Google said digital advertising practices had to "evolve".
[...] But Google intends to go further by ending support for all cookies except first-party ones - those used by sites to track activity within their own pages.
It wants to replace them with new tools that give advertisers more limited, anonymised information such as how many users visited a promoted product's page after seeing a relevant ad - but not tie this information to individual users.
[...] "Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals will potentially have a very significant impact on publishers like newspapers, and the digital advertising market. But there are also privacy concerns to consider," said Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA.
At that point it acknowledged that while there were benefits to consumers from the kinds of privacy measures Google was proposing, they might be outweighed by other concerns.
It added that "many news publishers" had expressed concern that their news sites would become "unsustainable".
[...] Last November, the government announced it would create a new Digital Markets Unit within the CMA.
The organisation subsequently detailed how it would to govern the behaviour of Google, Facebook and other tech platforms "that currently dominate" online markets, and give consumers "more control over how their data is used".
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