Privacy War in the W3C
But appealing to antitrust regulators was only one prong in Rosewell’s plan to get Google to delay its so-called Privacy Sandbox initiative. The other prong: becoming a member of the World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C.
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But what is perhaps more alarming, Soltani and Snyder argue, is that the new entrants from the ad-tech industry and elsewhere aren’t just trying to derail standards that could hurt their businesses; they’re proposing new ones that could actually enshrine tracking under the guise of privacy. “Fortunately in a forum like the W3C, folks are smart enough to get the distinction,” Soltani said. “Unfortunately, policymakers won’t.”
The “tech giant” framing of this piece obscures the multisided battle that is going on within these discussions. There are browser vendors — like Apple and Brave — that are more privacy-conscious, but with conflicts of interest, as well as people who advocate for these features with fewer conflicts. There are representatives of the big privacy-hostile tech companies: Google and Microsoft have web browsers, while Amazon and Facebook do not. And then there are ad tech companies that are smaller than the big tech companies but, as I have repeatedly argued, can be almost as creepy.
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