29 Dec 2023 Search

I’m going to exercise my right to opt out of doing year-end predictions this year, because the most significant privacy and web ad news will depend on the state of US support for Ukraine, and I don’t have any special knowledge of what is going to happen with that. If the USA comes through for Ukraine, then our allies are likely to try to smooth things over on privacy issues in order to keep the coalition together. If we half-ass it or pause, though, a lot of people are going to be asking what the hell happened, and trying to figure out what they can do with less support from the USA. So I can’t predict anything from where I sit. Some of the 2024 happenings I have no idea about:

You know the EU’s DSA proceeding against “X” (former Twitter)? Could be just the beginning. A loss of US funding would be seen as a hybrid warfare victory for Russia, and everyone will want to see how Russia took and held social media, to try to do better next time. Joohn Choe writes that Ukraine is generally a laboratory of disinformation and anti-disinfo tactics. So the European Commission could come up with good reasons to open up similar proceedings against all the big social sites.

Transparency and Consent Framework: still not transparent enough? Some of the thousands of companies that can receive information about you through web and mobile “real-time bidding” for ads are likely controlled by foreign adversaries. The new version of the industry’s Transparency & Consent Framework includes more required documentation from companies receiving RTB data, and proactive auditing of CMPs and Vendors that will be randomly selected each month. That might or might not be enough. Limiting the risk of sanctions-evading data flows by sending TCF back to the drawing board again would be a cheap way to try to stifle the flow of money into Russia’s war economy, without a dependency on the US government.

Google Privacy Sandbox/Performance Max and infringing sites: Are you ready kids? SpongeBob SquarePants on a copyright-infringing Russian site The Russians have gone in for copyright-infringing sites in a big way, and a lot of that stuff is monetized by Google. Today, Google can track visitors from legit to infringing sites using third-party cookies, but when they take those out of Google Chrome they’ll have to rely on other technologies, which the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority says they will ‘closely monitor’. The version of Topics API now in Google Chrome is set up to give advantages to large sites like YouTube at the expense of smaller ones and to copyright-infringing sites at the expense of legit ones.

Google might have been able to get away with this. There’s a (citation needed) story about a kleptomaniac princess from a UK-allied country who used to visit London and shoplift from Harrods. Law enforcement tolerated it to avoid an incident. But now elections are coming up, there’s a lot of popular support for Ukraine in the UK, and the copyright industries there are a big deal. Would be hard for UK regulators to justify coming down on the side of Russian pirates.

Safe Harbor/Privacy Shield/Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework This could be the big one, and it’s a stretch. As noyb.eu points out, the current proposal is the third attempt at a data sharing agreement, without substantial changes. Maybe the EU could be persuaded to let this third try squeak through if it would benefit a country that is a solid supporter on their biggest immediate problem, but sending your people’s data over to a country with an unresolved Russian influence situation is like sending your kids to spend the night with a family who all got positive virus tests.

So anyway, no predictions from me this year.