[brandon]

I don't mean to support or refuse the author's main points or analysis, but you might like to know that the Chrome team is currently working towards shipping the Topics API. I have strong opinions about it but I will try not to editorialize.

My high-level understanding is that they're going to run an ML model over your browsing history (locally on your device) to build a list of "topics" that you care about. Sites you browse can use the Topics API to pull a set of these interests from the browser to show you "relevant" ads. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this standard.

https://privacysandbox.com/proposals/topics/

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622

[afavour]

How is that relevant to the topic?

[Santosh83]

You asked:

>> Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed

> What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t?

[afavour]

Key words: "in this scenario"

Is Cloudflare using an as yet unshipped API as part of DDOS protection?

[smolder]

No, the idea is they're abusing existing APIs for fingerprinting purposes that Firefox privacy settings disallow --canvas font rendering difference detection, detecting your GPU model, and things of that nature.

But this new API demonstrates that Google is not on the consumers side when it comes to limiting tracking/data gathering ability, as the new API is explicitly for fingerprinting.

[afavour]

> No, the idea is they're abusing existing APIs for fingerprinting purposes that Firefox privacy settings disallow

But that’s exactly what I’m saying: the author asserts as fact the reason Chrome worked was because it gives up more personal information but there’s no interrogation of whether that’s actually true and if true, how it’s achieved.

I’m no defender of Google I just believe we should be making arguments we’re able to actually back up.

[CharlieDigital]

Fingerprinting is one of the techniques used to track you across the web.

If the site is serving Google, Meta, or ads from other networks, your unique browser fingerprint is one of the tools that makes it possible to target and retarget you.

[dcow]

I thought it was the opposite: that instead of fingerprinting users, web services would instead just ask the browser which topics the user is interested in and display the relevant ADs. It's an explicit design goal to reduce the dependence on fingerprinting users, otherwise why would they do it. Topics are supposed to be the locally sourced privacy preserving alternative to invasive tracking.

Whether Mozilla/Apple/others agree is a different story. The blowback has mostly been around how topics aren't perfect and the design still leaves room for abuse and therefor effectively devolves to traditional tracking: https://mozilla.github.io/ppa-docs/topics.pdf.

[youngtaff]

For me the issue is a browser shouldn’t be making the information on the topics of sites I visit available to anyone who asks

[soraminazuki]

That's a distinction without a difference. In both cases, user privacy is compromised. If anything, the proposal to make "user agents" snoop on the user is even more infuriating. That sounds more like trojan horse than "user agent."