Google announced a massive shift last week in how it handles cookies, those pesky digital trackers that chase us around the internet and serve up targeted ads that are both creepy yet eerily precise reflections of our wants. The search giant, which just helped Alphabet Inc. surpass a $1 trillion valuation, said it will eventually stop supporting third-party cookies in its ubiquitous Chrome browser.

The move won’t end the Big Brother era of Big Tech, but Google is framing the decision as a significant step away from unbridled data mining. In a blog post, Google references privacy about a dozen times, an awkward pitch for a company that built a juggernaut of a business by tapping into cookies from its billions of users. Can Google, after pioneering and protecting an apparent invasion of privac , sell its browser to consumers as a privacy-first service?

Google is going to try. That’s because the other browser makers are embracing privacy as a competitive advantage. Apple Inc. added cookie restrictions to Safari several years ago. Microsoft Corp. has been building a raft of tracking-prevention mechanisms into its Edge browser. And Mozilla Corp. has made paid privacy tools a core selling point of its Firefox service, though they’ve failed to catch on so far, leading to job cuts last week.

When Google first introduced Chrome in 2008, it essentially marketed the new browser as an online operating system, one that would treat popular web services—email, messaging, video streaming—as full-blown applications, rather than clunky web pages. Chrome was a fast, refreshing alternative to Firefox and Internet Explorer. In the decade since, it has soared in popularity: Chrome today boasts 63% worldwide market share, according to StatCounter.

Chrome also became a huge source of data, facilitating an ecosystem of Google services that kept feeding its advertising engine with more user information. The browser’s search box defaulted, of course, to Google, while users could log into the platform via Gmail to seamlessly access its products such Drive, Docs, Maps and YouTube, enabling the company to fill up ever-more jars of cookies. The dominance of the browser raised privacy concerns. One test last year found a whopping 11,189 requests for cookies in a week of surfing on Chrome. But only recently has Google started comprehensively rethinking its privacy policies, partly due to regulatory pressure and changing consumer sentiments around data collection.

“Users are demanding greater privacy—including transparency, choice and control over how their data is used—and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands,” Justin Schuh, director of Chrome engineering, wrote in the blog post last week.

Google deserves a measure of credit for adopting consumer protections that could undermine its relationship with marketers and publishers, and also raise further antitrust scrutiny. Still, such policies stop far short of ridding Google of ad-tracking altogether: They may simply end up increasing the value of so-called first-party cookies, which websites collect directly from their users, rather than through intermediaries. One company well-positioned to keep gobbling those up from its many devoted users? Google.

If you read one thing

Criticizing Facebook, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden called for the repeal of Section 230, the legal framework that protects internet companies from liability for user-generated content. The law provision has become a hot-button issue in the Democratic primary, at least among geeks. Some candidates are debating the merits of whether it promotes free expression online or gives technology companies an excuse for not adequately policing their platforms.

And here’s what you need to know in global technology news

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sought help from Elon Musk on how to fix the social network. At a congressional antitrust hearing, Sonos accused Alphabet and Amazon of leveraging their market power to stifle competition. Best Buy’s Corie Barry faces an investigation into allegations of personal misconduct, just six months after taking over as the electronics retailer’s chief executive officer.

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Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the free and open-source Firefox web browser, is partnering with Montreal-based artificial intelligence startup Element AI to push for ethical use of AI.

To that effect, the two companies are exploring the idea of data trusts, a proposed data collection approach that aims to provide individuals with greater control over their personal information.

The aim, the companies said, is to offer an alternative model to the current broken consent-based system of data collection such as the EU GDPR regulations.

It’s easy to see why. As artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) continues to infiltrate different aspects of our day-to-day lives, the technology is now doing more than ever — for both good and bad.

This necessitates an ethical use of such solutions to prevent misuse, and ensure there’re adequate controls over the massive amounts of data accessed by these algorithms.

The data trust, therefore, acts as a “steward” that gets to approve and control the collection of, and manage access to, data with an eye on privacy while not sacrificing the benefits of AI and ML.

In other words, a data trust — say, an independent watchdog agency — sets the terms of data collection, usage, and sharing, in addition to deciding who gets to access said information in a way that balances privacy and responsible use of technology.

The idea of a data trust is not new. Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs — which released blueprints for its controversial Quayside smart city in Toronto back in June — has set up a data governance model that places “urban data” under the control of an independent Civic Data Trust.

Despite the project’s promises to take a privacy by design means to minimizing data collection and its assurances that the gathered data will not be sold, used for advertising, or shared without people’s permission, the proposals have courted data monetization and surveillance concerns.

Privacy in the time of surveillance capitalism

With tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft becoming the de facto data monarchs of personal information, the idea that they can potentially use your data without actually having it is sure an appealing one.

It’s a widely accepted fact that most smart technologies today — be it data-driven, internet-connected, or automated — are rife with privacy issues.

Even as the battle to keep personal data private rages on, it’s expected of netizens to give up some level of privacy as the cost of admission for all the conveniences of the digital world, so much so that the existing frameworks begin to feel like mere band-aid solutions.

The tacit agreement between individuals and the powerful digital institutions that profit from the data gathered by profiling its users has led to a privacy paradox, with users left with no choice but to hit “accept” and move on.

It’s therefore essential that new digital governance methods are engineered to tackle the aforementioned disconnect and decouple personal data from the companies who need them in order to offer their services, ad-supported or otherwise.

Whether it’s by making individuals “data shareholders,” offering privacy as a paid service, or entrusting data in the hands of an independent “data trust,” it’s time to address the need for owning personal data so that privacy can be what it is — a fundamental human right that cannot be taken or given away.

The post Mozilla and Element AI want to build ‘data trusts’ in the artificial intelligence age appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.