Brian Merchant
This is, incidentally, how he plans to fund the operation—the basic version of webXray will be available to all, but Libert will offer a specialized tier for litigators, regulators, and businesses looking to keep their digital presences compliant with the law. He will also offer consulting services and serve as an expert witness in lawsuits.
I gave the keys to the site to digital rights activist Cory Doctorow, who took a quick look under the hood, and gave the idea a thumbs up. “I think the way to go here is class action,” Doctorow says, noting that this could lead to a trove of class action lawsuits against big tech companies. “So long as this is just exposing the API calls that produces evidence that Google is getting data that it doesn’t have lawful consent to receive or hold, this is the right move. I think it’s really a smoking gun,” he says.
Libert, for his part, concurs. “Yeah, I wanna be the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits—turn this into a factory assembly line.”
He’s already started. Three months after leaving Google, Libert served as an expert witness in a trial, testifying that websites were allegedly leaking data in violation of the law—against Google. His former employer tried to have him disqualified, arguing, somewhat ironically, that he knew too much. On Google’s policy and internal standards team, the company’s court records say, “Dr. Libert became the go-to person for all things related to cookies.” (On Monday, a judge dismissed that lawsuit, pending appeal.)
“When I did that first lawsuit, and used webXray for that, they lost it,” Libert says of Google’s reaction. “When you look at those legal filings, there’s one thing that’s driving that—fear. They’re afraid of this data being available, because they know it affects the bottom line. And it scares them.”
“One of the tragedies of Google is they used to lead by example in a positive way, and I think especially in the past three to five years, they’re not leading by positive example, they’re systematically leading by negative example,” Libert says. “And I think that’s burning down the web—the most powerful company doing things like recommending you put glue on your pizza. It’s not just that a website is doing that, it’s that the website, the advertising platform is doing that, and that was part of my frustration.”
Google of course disagrees with this characterization of its tools and operations. “We design and build our products with strong security and privacy protections, including easy-to-use controls for managing and deleting data,” Bryant, the company spokesperson, says. “When it comes to advertising, Google was the first company to build a tool that lets people see and adjust their ads settings and even opt out of personalized ads entirely.”
Despite Libert’s gloomy view of the current state of online privacy, he is actually an optimist. He believes webXray will help speed up a shift to a better, more private, more secure web—the path to which Google and the other tech giants are currently blocking. And it’s no coincidence, perhaps, that there’s been an exodus from Google’s privacy teams in the last few months: The announcement of Keith Enright, Google’s privacy chief, exiting the company came in June, and the position “will not be replaced.” Libert says his colleagues are getting fired en masse. To Libert, it seems that Google is deprioritizing privacy at the very moment when users are calling for stronger policies.
“The problem we had 10 to 15 years ago is that there weren’t any laws. Now lots of countries have passed laws—the vast majority of people on the planet are protected by data privacy laws, but enforcement hasn’t caught up,” he says. “It’s going to catch up. I think we can speed it up.” Because people want privacy; it’s that simple. It’s why he imagines law offices, government offices, and businesses turning to his new search engine to help root out the scourge of privacy violations across the web.
It’s why, perhaps, webXray’s tagline is simple and idealistic: “Privacy is inevitable.”
I guess we’ll find out.
Updated 7/24/2024, 1:50 pm: Clarified the launch date of webXray, which was officially released publicly on Wednesday.