New Tracking Prevention in Microsoft's Edge Will Hit Google the Hardest

'Microsoft's Edge browser is built on the same open source code as
Google Chrome. But Ed Bott, writing for ZDNet, noticed something
interesting:

On January 15, 2020, Microsoft is scheduled to roll out a completely
revamped Edge browser to the general public. That browser, which is
available for beta testing now on all supported versions of Windows
and MacOS, includes a feature called Tracking Prevention. If that name
sounds familiar, you're not imagining things. Microsoft added a
Tracking Protection feature to Internet Explorer 9, back in 2011; it
used simple text files called Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs) to
allow or block third-party requests from specific domains. That's the
same general principle behind Tracking Prevention in the new Edge, but
the implementation is more usable and more sophisticated, with
multiple Trust Protection Lists taking the place of a single TPL.

I've spent the past week looking closely at this feature... [A]lthough
it's aimed at the online advertising and tracking industries in
general, my tests suggest that its effects are likely to be felt most
directly by one company: Google.

Using the default Balanced setting, Tracking Prevention blocked a
total of 2,318 trackers, or an average of 35 on each page. Of that
total, 552 were from Google domains. That's a mind-boggling 23.8% of
the total. To put that into perspective, the second entry on the list
of blocked trackers was Facebook, which represented 3.8% of the total.

Rather than an anti-Google conspiracy, the article suggests this is
instead just a reflection of both Google's ubiquity and its business
model.

"Google Analytics and Google AdSense are embedded on a staggering
number of web pages."'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/11/24/2055219

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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