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Monday, May 6, 2019

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Technology - Google News

Google Set To Launch New Privacy Tools To Limit Cookies - The Wall Street Journal

Posted: 06 May 2019 07:11 AM PDT

Google's Chrome browser is set to offer a dashboard-like function that will give users more information about what cookies are tracking them. Photo: Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
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Google is set to launch new tools to limit the use of tracking cookies, a move that could strengthen the search giant's advertising dominance and deal a blow to other digital-marketing companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

After years of internal debate, Google could as soon as this week roll out a dashboard-like function in its Chrome browser that will give internet users more information about what cookies are tracking them and offer options to fend them off, the people said.

This is a more incremental approach than less-popular browsers, such as Apple Inc.'s Safari and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, which introduced updates to restrict by default the majority of tracking cookies in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Google's move, which could be announced at its developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., starting Tuesday, is expected to be touted as part of the company's commitment to privacy—a complicated sell, given the torrent of data it continues to store on users—and press its sizable advantage over online-advertising rivals.

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The unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.47% is the world's largest digital ad seller. The coming changes aren't expected to significantly curtail Google's ability to collect data.

A cookie is a small text file stored in an internet browser that lets companies silently follow users around the internet, gathering information such as which sites they have visited and what ads they have viewed or clicked. Initially developed in 1994 to help e-commerce sites remember when a user had placed an item in a shopping cart, cookies have since become ubiquitous across the web—and reviled by privacy advocates and many users.

Yet cookies also boost competition in the advertising landscape by allowing hundreds of digital firms—large and small—to collect their own user data and sell higher-priced ads based on it. Any restriction on them is a boon to the biggest tech companies, including Google, which can target ads based on the slew of other information it collects on users through its many products.

Google, like its browser rivals, isn't planning to end the use of cookies that websites use to make their own users' experience smoother, such as those that store login information so users don't have to enter it every time. Instead, it is mostly targeting cookies installed by profit-seeking third parties, separate from the owner of the website a user is actively visiting.

If the new Google tools prompt users to broadly reject tracking cookies, some people in the industry think it could mean the long-predicted demise of a technology that is both widely criticized and used.

"It really strikes at the Achilles' heel of the ad tech ecosystem," said Ratko Vidakovic, a Toronto-based consultant in the digital ad industry.

Google has been working on the cookies plan for its Chrome browser—which commands almost two-thirds of the desktop-browser market share—for at least six years, in stops and starts. Work accelerated in the past year, after the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 campaign.

​Google handles 90% of the world's internet searches, and it increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions. Even subjective or unanswerable queries sometimes get seemingly definitive answers. Here's how the algorithms are -- and aren't -- working. Video/Photo Illustration: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal

The delay by Google was partly due to the technological complexity of the project. Google had considered creating a so-called browser identifier—linked to everything a user does, which advertisers could see—that could be easily toggled on or off by users. However, they trashed the plan because it required changing millions of lines of code and potentially renegotiating thousands of outside agreements, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The importance of cookies has been waning as users move their web activity to smartphones, as they only work within browsers and cannot be used within apps.

Google in recent months invited advertising executives to its offices in Mountain View and New York to sound them out on the shift—on the condition they sign nondisclosure agreements. People who attended the meetings said the company was tight-lipped on the details of its cookies project, instead floating hypothetical scenarios and asking for opinions.

The changes could be damaging to Google competitors that use cookies or resell data collected via cookies to companies hoping to better target ads. Shares in one such company, Paris-based Criteo SA, which helps sites tag cookies on their visitors, are down 27% since Adweek reported in late March that Google was considering new restrictions.

Criteo's chief executive during its recent quarterly earnings call flagged risks due to coming restrictions on cookies, and said the company was working to become less reliant on cookies.

Write to Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com and Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com

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Microsoft unveils Azure cloud updates at Build 2019 - CNBC

Posted: 06 May 2019 08:30 AM PDT

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, sits in the Volkswagen Digital Lab in Friedrichshain, Germany, for a joint press conference with the chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen on Feb. 27, 2019.

Bernd von Jutrczenka | picture alliance | Getty Images

Microsoft on Monday used the start of its Build developer conference in Seattle as an opportunity to unleash a slew of updates to its lineup of cloud services.

For instance, Microsoft is letting users of its GitHub code hosting service provide their login credentials in order to access Azure cloud tools. At the same time, the company is making GitHub's enterprise tier compatible with the Microsoft Azure Active Directory service, so administrators will be able to more easily manage employees' GitHub use.

These changes and other enhancements could lead to greater adoption of Microsoft's overall Azure public cloud for hosting applications and storing data. That's critical as Amazon continues to maintain a big lead in the market and Google, which is thought to be behind Microsoft, is doubling down on its cloud efforts under its new chief, Thomas Kurian. Amazon had 32% of cloud market share at the end of 2018, according to Canalys. Microsoft had 13.7% and Google had 7.6%.

Microsoft has talked about cloud at its Build shows in past years, but this year it seems to be at the very center of the company's appeal to developers. Executives onstage are spending less time this year talking about consumer products like Windows and Surface computers.

GitHub, which Microsoft bought last year for $7.5 billion, could represent an on-ramp of sorts for Microsoft public cloud services.

"As the companies [Microsoft and GitHub] work together even more, there is an opportunity to educate them on Azure and how they should think about developing apps on top of Azure. And so we will certainly be promoting Azure to the GitHub community, but for the GitHub developers, really it's whatever cloud they want to build on and we're going to support that," Dave O'Hara, chief financial officer of Microsoft's commercial business, said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in February.

On Monday, Microsoft said it will release an Azure SQL Database tool that can handle computing in a "serverless" capacity. This means developers won't have to set up and manage underlying resources for databases. Amazon and Google have also come out with serverless database technologies.

For almost two years now Microsoft has worked with partners, including third-party software makers, to sell Azure to companies, benefiting both Microsoft and its partners. The so-called co-sell initiative has led to more than $5 million in partner annual contract value in the past year.

Now Microsoft is expanding the program to Microsoft 365 — a bundle that includes Windows 10, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility & Security software — and the Dynamics suite of enterprise software, including the cloud-based sales management application that competes with Salesforce's core Sales Cloud.

In the first quarter, Amazon picked up $7.7 billion in revenue from AWS. Microsoft does not specify revenue from Azure, but analysts Alex Zukin and Scott Wilson of Piper Jaffray estimated that Azure produced around $3.6 billion in revenue in the quarter. Microsoft did say that Azure revenue rose 73% year over year.

WATCH: Microsoft tops revenue estimates in third quarter

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Microsoft is building Internet Explorer into its new Chromium Edge - The Verge

Posted: 06 May 2019 08:30 AM PDT

Microsoft is unveiling a number of new features for its upcoming Edge Chromium browser today. The first big addition is a new "IE Mode" for Edge that will allow businesses to load old sites directly in the new Edge Chromium browser, using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Microsoft is building IE directly into Edge for this purpose, so businesses aren't forced to directly use IE for ancient internal sites.

"What we're going to do is make this totally seamless," explains Microsoft's Joe Belfiore, in an interview with The Verge. Currently, the existing version of Edge will open Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10, which has a separate interface, favorites, and doesn't work well on modern websites. This new IE mode literally loads the content within Edge, so you'd never be able to tell the difference, apart from a small IE logo on the tab that indicates that this mode has been enabled.

This new IE mode is designed exclusively for businesses, and Belfiore admits it's a big pitch to get them to use Edge Chromium instead of a combination of Chrome and Internet Explorer. "We've got a browser for you that updates regularly that will go on Windows 7 and the Mac that handles things like IT customization of the New Tab page and Microsoft Search, and IE built-in," says Belfiore.

Microsoft is also allowing businesses to customize the New Tab page for Edge Chromium. This will involve a custom company logo, the option to load some sites into the top tabs, and integration with Microsoft Search and Office 365.

While these features will be mainly targeted at businesses, Microsoft is also building an entirely new Collections feature for Edge Chromium. This is perhaps the most interesting feature addition to Edge so far, and it's designed for web users to be able to more easily collect text, images, and information from the internet into a note. It goes beyond simple notes, though. Microsoft is linking the images you drag and drop into these collections, and even text into references back to the original websites where you found them.

You'll then be able to share this with friends or family via email or instantly export it to Word or Excel. This seems super useful if you're collecting information about a big purchase, as you'll be able to export to a list in Excel that can be sorted by price. If you're a teacher or student collecting information from the web, then these collections will all have citations. It's even useful if you're just researching vacation locations and you want to easily share your collection of information.

Microsoft is also focusing on privacy enhancements to Edge, specifically on blocking web trackers that follow you on the web. Microsoft has been on a privacy mission in recent years, and it's something CEO Satya Nadella constantly talks about focusing on. "We're going to give you, the user, control over your privacy and try to explain in a way that's clear," explains Belfiore.

Microsoft is planning to create a single privacy page in Edge that will allow users to choose from three different levels: unrestricted, balanced, and strict. All three are designed to block malicious trackers on the web, but the level of ad tracking will vary a lot across each mode. Unrestricted is designed to allow trackers from all sites, with personalized ads. Balanced mode, which should be the default, blocks trackers from sites you haven't visited yet, meaning you'll see fewer ads based on sites you've visited. The most aggressive tracking prevention will be found under the strict control, which blocks all trackers, meaning you won't see ads tracking you around the web at all.

The strict mode is aggressive, which does mean some websites might break because of these trackers being blocked. Microsoft's implementation is "specific to ad trackers" and not designed to block all ad content, explains Belfiore. That means that it's similar to third-party extensions like Ghostery, but it won't block all of the ad elements you see on a page.

Microsoft is even adding strict tracking prevention to its incognito mode, so it's clear that if you use that mode, then nothing will be tracked. The software giant still hasn't figured out all of the exact details on its tracking prevention. "We have some initial ideas that we think are pretty good," admits Belfiore. "We like this general approach, but there's a lot of detail."

It's not clear when all of these new Edge features will be available, but Microsoft is announcing them today as work has begun on all of these new features, and parts of them could show up in Chromium commits and trigger questions for the company. If you're testing Edge Canary, then you'll be among the first to try out any of these new features, even if Microsoft hides them behind a settings flag.

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