this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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It’s a little ridiculous how people misunderstand this issue. This is literally to do away with the extremely privacy-invasive tracking that has been done using cookies and telemetry for years. You will be tracked less in Chrome than you did before, because the browser will hand off less information to sites you visit and there will be a degree of randomisation. This is to get rid of cookies soon, and to randomise the information a site gets when you visit instead of the whole deal.
It is, of course, more personalised than blocking all cookies and randomising telemetry, but if you were doing that, I expect you weren’t using Chrome to begin with. Using a Chrome browser with Topics is inherently more privacy-forward than using Chrome as it has been so far. Honestly, I hope that the deprecation of cookies will even help *Fox users down the lines as they become irrelevant to a large part of the web users.
If you want a solid explanation of what is actually happening with Topics, Security Now episode 935 explains the details. The transcript dives into Topics on page 9, explains the technicalities on page 12 and if you just want the conclusion, you can skip to the penultimate page and read the last few paragraphs in here: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-935-notes.pdf (you can listen as well if you’d rather.)
Unlike Web Integrity Protection this is a reasonable step in the right direction. Can it break down the line? Sure. But then we’re back at where we were. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to use Firefox and Safari and hope that this will eventually help stop the cookie banner nightmare on those browsers as well (even if the cookies do nothing.)
It's because ANY COMMERCIAL TRACKING AT ALL is unacceptable!
Chrome is trying to have it's cake and eat it too by removing 3rd party cookies and baking in another tracking methodology anyways.
The User Has Spoken and we DEMAND that there be NO TRACKING! The browser devs are complying with that demand in various ways to various degrees.
Firefox complies with this demand openly and honestly. Third party cookies are not a thing much anymore and the browser actively tries to punish companies who try to do it anyways; while also allowing us to turn to other plugin developers to further punish companies who try to aggressively invade our privacy.
Google Chrome, on the other hand, complies very maliciously because it's made by one of those companies who are trying to track us anyways. It removes third party cookies on the one hand and on the other hand tries to introduce other tracking technologies and WebDRM while also trying to severely curtail browser plugins that we choose to install to assert our rights to privacy our way.
You can't tell me that's not an evil dick move on the part of Google and the Chrome team. Chrome needs to clean up it's act and the development team of Chromium needs to forcefully eject it's Google developers and find new ones to retake the internet.
Google developers cannot be trusted not to put the interests of Google first; it's literally what they're paid to do.
See my other post in this thread for more nuance, but you sound like you shouldn’t be using Chrome in the first place (and maybe you don’t?) I feel the same way personally about browsing and use software accordingly. It is, however, still an improvement for the average Chrome user who is not tech savvy and won’t be using ad-blocking anyway (brrr - imagine using the web like that).
Please. Stop defending Chrome. It needs to do way better than what it is doing currently; which is utterly disrespectful and malicious to all users.
It’s a shitty browser. Wouldn’t use it myself. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t an improvement on what was there before. The world isn’t black and white - and privacy conscious people stay away from Chrome.
Stop defending the indefensible.
Stop repeating the inane and misunderstood.