17th February 2021 | Cookies | Art
Why Google is killing third-party cookies; sending the artefacts home
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Cookies are over. Well, most of them.
It is a year since Google announced that it was going to phase out third-party cookies, and we have about a year to go before it actually happens. Third party cookies are the ones that are attached to our web behaviour by advertising and marketing companies, and track our behaviour across the internet.
Past Google research says that cookies produce a 50% premium; an independent study by economists, using a different methodology, put the uplift at 4%.
Anyway, cookies are the reason, in short, why you are pursued across the internet by advertisements for camping equipment once you’ve searched for hiking socks.
They also a represent a massive (and largely invisible) intrusion on users’ privacy.
So as from 2022, Google is going to remove them from Chrome. Apple and Firefox have got there before them, but their business models don’t depend on advertising. Google is redesigning Chrome so it delivers some advertising information but in a different way.
Why is Google doing this? I’d say that they’re jumping before they get pushed. We are in a new era of coming tech regulation, and privacy is one of the early battle-lines. Better to design the thing yourself than have a policy-maker impose something on you.
And, as a recent Wired article noted, Google’s alternative proposal benefits companies with high traffic, such as Google:
Google’s plan is to target ads against people’s general interests using an AI system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). The machine learning system takes your web history, among other things, and puts you into a certain group based on your interests. Google hasn’t defined what these groups will be yet but they will include thousands of people that have similar interests. Advertisers will then be able to put ads in front of people based on the group they’re in.
The Wired article is technical in places, but my reading of it is that it is another example of big tech proposing ways to deal with genuine regulatory concerns by proposing solutions that benefit big tech companies. (Amazon and Facebook both have form here as well).
And although advertisers insist on the need for cookies, they seem to be a drug that they have got hooked on without actually trying alternatives. Further: simpler alternatives—that don’t involve Google’s scale—might also work just fine. Last year Wired had a story about a Dutch broadcaster that removed cookies from its website. They replaced it with a system of contextual advertising that was blind to individual users. Their revenues went up, significantly. Maybe trust matters more than advertisers think it does. Or maybe cookies matter a lot less.
#2: Sending the artefacts home
(Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, 1661, Rijksmuseum)
The Netherlands is about to become the first company in the work—it thinks—to implement a formal “right of return” on artworks that were taken from other countries. The country is between governments at the moment—the last one resigned en masse because of a tax scandal—but ministers continue in post for the meantime. Ingrid van Engelshoven, the minister of education, culture and science, announced the adoption of an advisory committee report at the end of January.
“We must treat colonial collections with great sensitivity,” van Engelshoven said. “There is no place in the Dutch State Collection for cultural heritage objects that were acquired through theft.”
The Dutch were the leading global power in the 17th century, and had trading posts and colonies in Asia, Africa and North and South America from the beginning of the century. The Dutch East Indies Company was a significant trading body. Some colonies lasted until the 20th century.
The committee’s report describes this era as “a time characterised by exploitation, violence, racism and oppression.” Its proposals, which the government now plans to act on, include:
an independent assessment committee to adjudicate claims and examine provenance reports; research projects into colonial collections in collaboration with Indonesia, Suriname and Dutch territories in the Caribbean; a policy to unconditionally return objects looted from Dutch colonies; and a pledge to weigh the interests of parties in the case of items that were stolen from other countries’ colonies.
Obviously this is going to be complicated, even with a statement of Principles and Processes. Lawyers may be involved. But Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Tropenmuseum estimate that they’ll return 100,000 pieces. This is a trend that, for the foreseeable future, is heading only in one direction. Sooner or later, the British Museum will have to send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece.
#j2t#033
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.