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Lee Duna @lemmy.nz

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

6 comments

  • Google's IP Protection means ISPs will no longer have visibility of data via an IP address whist leaving Google with the ability to monitor and process data at all times

    It would be easy to be fooled by this but it's a non sequitur for one, and also this is the UK government we're talking about. They routinely pass laws that infringe on our privacy and persistently try to restrict citizens from e.g. watching porn that they don't approve of.

    The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time and this move from Google is a spanner in the works of their grand designs to turn British Internet into a walled garden.

  • I fail to see how this is anticompetitive. Google already mines all my data. If they plan to stop the cops from having that ability, I'm fine with it.

    • google can still mine the data, but a web site and their 'marketing' and 'analytics' cannot track and id users by ip. google still gets all that sweet browser data, they also run public dns. they can still put '2 and 2 together' even if the destination is 'cloaked'. that's what's "anti-competitive".

      but with everybody clinging to ipv4, cgnat is becoming more and more common. it's time for those 'marketing' and 'analytics' companies to learn that an ip address does not translate to a single user, or even a single household--so quit trying to track or identify users by ip.

  • All I'm seeing is yet another reason why google needs to be broken up.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    IP Protection, previously referred to as "ip-blindness" or "Gnatcatcher," is a proxy system similar to Apple's Privacy Relay.

    MOW objects to this project as a violation of Google's commitments to the CMA, a set of promises the ad biz made to the UK competition watchdog to win approval for its plan to replace third-party cookies with Privacy Sandbox technologies.

    "Google's IP Protection means ISPs will no longer have visibility of data via an IP address whist leaving Google with the ability to monitor and process data at all times," says a letter from MOW's London-based legal representative Preiskel & Co LLP to the CMA and to UK telecom regulator Ofcom, which was provided to The Register.

    And marketers, like law enforcement agencies, fear that privacy technologies will leave them in the dark and without the lucrative data they've come to depend upon.

    For example, one pseudonymous individual who claims to help advertising clients optimize Google AdWords campaigns says that IP addresses play a critical role in fraud prevention.

    "This is a blatant and egregious breach of the commitments made by Google to the CMA to prevent it acting in an anti-competitive fashion," said Tim Cowen, co-founder of MOW, in a statement provided to The Register.

    The original article contains 777 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

6 comments