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by jepler 635 days ago
this was my first thought as well. Authors just acknowledge it and move on; it's not like shopify and google care whether there's another way to successfully track users online.

    10.  Privacy Considerations

       Since dictionaries are advertised in future requests using the hash
       of the content of the dictionary, it is possible to abuse the
       dictionary to turn it into a tracking cookie.
1 comments
patrickmeenan 634 days ago
Which is why they are treated as if they are cookies and are cleared any time the cache or cookies are cleared so that they can not provide an additional tracking vector beyond what cookies can do (and when 3rd party cookies are partitioned by site/frame, they are also partitioned the same).

There are LOTS of privacy teams within the respective companies, W3C and IETF that have looked it over to make sure that it does not open any new abuse vectors. It's worth noting that Google, Mozilla and Apple are all supportive of the spec and have all been involved over the last year.

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patrickmeenan 634 days ago
Sorry, I should provide more context. The language in the IETF draft is a bit generic because it is a HTTP spec intended to be used more broadly than just web content in browsers and each should evaluate the risks for their use case.

For browsers specifically, the fetch spec changes will be explicit about the cache clearing and partitioning (partitioned by both top-level document site and frame origin). You can see Chrome's implementation here: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:net...

The fetch spec changes are in progress (just documenting, the discussions have already happened). You can follow along here if you'd like: https://github.com/whatwg/fetch/issues/1739

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