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by chrischapman 1599 days ago
> More importantly, topics are thoughtfully curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race.

'Thoughtfully curated' by whom? The user or Google? This seems like it's less about privacy and more about advertising. I wonder if it would have been more honest to call it Advertising Sandbox?
2 comments
yunohn 1599 days ago
> Today, we’re announcing Topics, a new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising.

FTA, they're very clear about it being for advertising; just also with privacy in mind.

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Ensorceled 1599 days ago
> 'Thoughtfully curated' by whom? The user or Google?

As long as the base list is relatively short, published, and no other data is sent; it probably doesn't matter.

If it's a long list, or changes a lot, then the concern that "Recent Abortion" or "Transitioning" or "Pregnant" or "BLM Activist" or "Trump Supporter" or ... will start to drift into the list if it's valuable enough.

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alyandon 1599 days ago
You know it will though.

If I as a user had the ability to select the subset of the lists of interests and ensure that only those interest categories are ever signaled to a site then I'd almost be fine with Google's current proposal. However, we all know Google will most likely never allow end user control and will go to great lengths to obfuscate what data they are actually sending to sites.

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judge2020 1599 days ago
> to obfuscate what data they are actually sending to sites.

Not exactly a thing with Chrome. You can inspect the full JS heap, dig through the call stack one function at a time, and view exactly what goes in and out of XHRs.

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alyandon 1599 days ago
Sure, but if Chrome sends a header with a bunch of opaque identifiers that I can't reasonably map to an interest category then that doesn't really help me much.
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