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Google Chrome: Agree to 'privacy feature', but get tracking!

noyb - European Center for Digital Rights

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Forced Consent & Consent Bypass After years of growing criticism over invasive ad tracking, Google announced in September 2023 that it would phase out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. Since then, users have been gradually tricked into enabling a supposed “ad privacy feature” that actually tracks people. While the so-called “Privacy Sandbox” is advertised as an improvement over extremely invasive third-party tracking, the tracking is now simply done within the browser by Google itself. To do this, the company theoretically needs the same informed consent from users. Instead, Google is tricking people by pretending to “Turn on an ad privacy feature”. noyb has therefore filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority. Complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (EN)Complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (DE)“Informed”, “transparent” and “fair”? Google’s internal browser tracking was introduced to users via a pop-up that said “turn on