For the Internet to regain its humanistic fundamentals and progressive intentions, it is high time to rediscover the boundless joys of playful expeditions in the common cyberspace, without having to give up the protection of one’s personal data.
On the flip side, the Internet still bears the traces of its original utopias: connecting people, offering content, allowing you to move from one content to another, to discover new things, to waste your time sometimes wandering digitally… all in a collaborative and shared space.
On the other side, the tracking and personalization of content, advertising targeting by site. Under the pretext of personalizing and individualizing the approach, extensive tracing and targeting became widespread and have since greatly altered personal experience. Silent silos have been built and dangerous artifacts have imposed themselves without the Internet user having a say.
Among the fantasies of the great global web that have taken shape, there is one that remains present in the collective imagination: the web is a space where we always end up finding people who share the same passions, even if they are niches, and we can build great things through collective and disinterested participation. Like a Wikipedia or the many mutual aid sites that exist on the web, this shared and solidarity web, which appeals to our share of social responsibility, has not disappeared. But it has become markedly marginalized over time, and initiatives initially considered virtuous have proved less selfless.
For example, Facebook Connect has become a registration facilitator on all sites requiring a profile. In exchange, the user accepts tracking wherever he goes, regardless of the device used or the app consulted. The promise was to facilitate tedious registration, but the counterpart involved is heavy in terms of relinquishing one’s privacy.
Ultra-targeting fragments the user experience while sometimes turning to the absurd by locking it into bizarre logics of interest (if you are interested in it you will like it) and above all, by depriving it of its free will and its ability to marvel by wandering freely on the web. By wanting to personalize everything by continuous tracking of the Internet user, we have lost the initial social soul of the web, as described for the first time in the early 1960s, by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Internet has proven it during its already rich and eventful history: Everything is never definitively written. Standards appear and then disappear (goodbye, Flash), giants become outsiders (Yahoo, what have you become?), habits change (who would have bet that the phone would dethrone the tablet?), projects do not transform habits so much (who has his pair of Google Glasses?). Unlimited tracking is therefore not inevitable.
By putting respect for Internet users at the heart of practices, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has profoundly changed things in Europe and around the world over the past 3 years by setting clear rules and imposing strong sanctions for all those who are not in compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act.
Even web players are starting to adapt their practices. Since iOS 14.5, pervasive tracking by third-party apps must be accepted by the user. And to ensure the cooperation of the most recalcitrant, Apple will even ban apps that reward users who activate tracking.
Because, after collecting personal data in all directions, brands, guided by the GDPR, begin to ask questions of relevance and scope. Is there a technological and commercial future without tracking? Do they need to have such a fine and detailed profiling of Internet users to target them? Can we achieve substantially the same result without encroaching on the individual freedom of the Internet user? Can we give him back the freedom to wander around and make decisions without having been pre-oriented?
Among the mechanisms proposed by some, however, it is quite easy to detect a desire to preserve the status quo. The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposed by Google for Chrome hides rather poorly an insidious targeting and we know very well that the user remains perfectly identifiable. Moreover, the EFF (historical organization fighting for digital rights) was not mistaken and recalls that most users will not know how to manage the complexity of the device.
In addition, we have forgotten that one of the most important principles of the web is to reduce the number of clicks between your request and the response. Amazon owes part of its success to one-click purchase. Now we are seeing the opposite effect. Open a media or thematic news site at random and count non-advertising pop-ups: you must refuse the use of location, refuse notifications in the browser, refuse the newsletter, validate the use or not of cookies, etc. And at this point, you haven’t closed the display pop-ups yet. What hell!
The CNIL has just taken up the subject and specified that refusing cookies must be as simple as accepting them. It has already put in formal notice about twenty organizations that clearly seek to dissuade you from refusing them. Even if it has not yet pronounced on cookie walls that require to accept all cookies or to pay a monthly subscription of one or two Euros, this abusive practice has – clearly – startled many Internet users and is in its sights.
Internet users, and not only the most militant, are tired of dark patterns, cookie walls, endless tracking and small maneuvers that make them feel like wallets to be emptied and brains whose attention must be captured at all costs. A few, and there are more and more of them, are convinced that the Internet is more than that, and that its users are better than that. At Qwant, we are!
“Net neutrality”, like our freedom of thought, are the founding principles of the Internet, which exclude, whatever the motivation, any discrimination with regard to the source, destination or content of information transmitted over the network. Let us not forget that.
A better web is not necessarily the disinterested and unmonetized one of the last century! A better web is a wonderful technological tool that users should be able to use safely, not the other way around.
At Qwant, we liberate the Internet user: An imperative to build a “Better Web”!
