Either Facebook and Google are completely incompetent and have lost the ability to create innovative solutions to real problems, or they are simply lying to us.
How can we trust companies that makes billions from collecting and selling our data to actually do anything about protecting our privacy?
I don’t think we can.
Facebook and Google like to remind us from time to time how much they respect user’s privacy. They announce grand projects intended to convince us of their sincerity but I can’t help wonder why they never actually accomplish anything?
Is it a lack of sincerity or a lack of ability?
Live Fast and Break Things…Lots of things
You’d think that companies like Google and Facebook who between them employ almost 200,000 of the best and brightest minds in technology, would be the most vibrant and innovative companies in the world. Yet, a couple of recent reports reveal that their lead may be slipping.
For example, in January 2020, Google announced they would phase out third party tracking cookies in their Chrome browser by January 2022. Tracking cookies allow app programmers to place little bits of code into your browser allowing them to track everything you do and aim ads specifically to you.
Eighteen months later they postponed the demise of cookies until 2023 so they could develop a new ‘privacy sandbox’ solution called FLoC. FLoC would be more subtle than a simple ban of tracking cookies, promising to walk the fine line between securing users’ privacy while still offering algorithmically curated advertising and enhanced search targeting.
What the FLoC?
Zack Doffman provides a compelling case for Why You Should Delete Google Chrome After New Tracking Admission in Forbes. Doffman reports that after 18 months of work, Google had to postpone their efforts to secure Chrome again because it turns out that FLoC actually made things worse by adding yet another identifier to your data.
Facebook demonstrated similar technical ineptitude this week when BBC reported that they were genuinely sorry that their AI algorithm mistakenly labelling Black people as Primates.
It’s curious how Google – a company that creates cool things like cloud storage, hosted email, and cars that drive around the world scanning every street to build a virtual map – cannot actually make privacy protection work?
Facebook is a $100 billion/year advertising company that has no problem using AI and algorithms to create incredibly accurate profiles of every single user. Yet, they cannot make the AI accurate enough so as not to mislabel people as primates?
Trust in Tech
Either Facebook and Google are completely incompetent and have lost the ability to create innovative solutions to real problems, or they are simply lying to us.
How can we trust companies that makes billions from collecting and selling our data to actually do anything about protecting our privacy?
I don’t think we can.