10 ms·

Get to Know the New Topics API for Privacy Sandbox

68 points by abraham 5y ago

chrischapman 5y 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?
- Ensorceled 5y 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.
  - alyandon 5y 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.
    - judge2020 5y 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.
      - alyandon 5y 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.
- yunohn 5y 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.
no_time 5y ago
Just tell me which lines do I need to modify in chromium to feed it fake data.
radiKal07 5y ago
Cool. Can I turn this feature off completly?
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Yes: Can I control the topics in my browser, or opt out completely? In Chrome settings, you will be able to find which topics have been generated based on your browsing history. You will be able to block specific topics or opt out of the Privacy Sandbox technologies completely.
Rygian 5y ago
"your browser determines a handful of topics" And that's where I stop reading. Now the software installed on my own devices is going to provide third-party sites with information about myself against my will?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gkbrk 5y ago
  > against my will Is it really against your will if you install and use an application that costs millions to develop, provided to the user at zero cost, made by the biggest advertisement and customer profiling company?
  - Rygian 5y ago
    The only situation where it would stop being "against my will" would be if Google advertised Chrome as "not a web browser, but rather a tool that I can use to leak my personal habits voluntarily."
  - sebow 5y ago
    The 'you're the product' is a legitimate argument, but this argument makes sense only if you are aware of the phenomenon.When you think at the scale of Chrome/Firefox, it doesn't.The reason is simple: the average user is not aware of updates and changes (at all), especially those related to privacy and data.(Yes, despite the "transparency" commitments of Google/etc).Most people will still only see that the new firefox version introduced a new color theme or something equivalently useless. So kind of, yes, these are against the user's will.Now my proposed solution is straight-out stop using them, but since 95%+ of people can't do that, there's no simple solution.(besides the simplest most effective one)
  - TruthWillHurt 5y ago
    You're forgetting the core - Chromium - is open-source.
kreeben 5y ago
>> With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history. Google's definition of what is a browser absolutely disgusts me. Please Firefox, Waterfox, Whateverfox, stay in the game for as long as you can because when you die, a piece of me will, too.
- gzer0 5y ago
  I find it the situation with Firefox and Google rather dire; Firefox seems to only be alive at this point because they receive annually $450 million USD from Google [1]. What happens when these payments disappears? Firefox is most definitely beholden to Google. Safari, seems to be the only real competitor right now, but again, Google is paying Apple ~$12 billion USD a year to be the default search engine there as well [2]. I know that the points I bring up relate to search engine dominance, but in a way, it extends much further than that. Firefox web browser is afloat solely because of these payments. [1] https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...
  - lpcvoid 5y ago
    If it forces Mozilla (the corp) to abandon their stupid side projects and refocus on developing Firefox, I'm all for a huge budget cut.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > If it forces Mozilla (the corp) to abandon their stupid side projects and refocus on developing Firefox, I'm all for a huge budget cut. Given the apparent reasoning behind the Servo team being laid off a couple of years ago, I don't think Mozilla's response to a budget cut would be a renewed focus on Firefox. I suspect that instead what users would get is yet another Chromium based browser... along with a bunch of side projects.
ohCh6zos 5y ago
Could an extension send back random topics to poison the well?
- lelandfe 5y ago
  YES. I love it. If Topics are simply determined by a user’s browsing history, perhaps loading a lot of junk in the background - or even manipulating Chrome’s history directly?
  - moritonal 5y ago
    Well you've hit the nail on the head really. Unless it's signed somehow, what stopping Brave providing random to the websites, thus meaning they're unable to trust the result making the whole thing moot? Worse yet, if there is a signing process, that'd be a verifiable way of proving a user's client-browser, which is arguably worse.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    Google banned it from the Chrome addon listing, but AdNauseam was built with somewhat the same idea: poisoning ad profiles by injecting fake user behaviour. It hides ads (it's based on uBlock Origin, after all) but it still loads all the scripts and clicks every ad it can detect to poison your ad profile and tell off advertisers. It can also present a nice overview of the banners clicked. The addon still works, but it seems to be in a state of limited maintenance.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Clicking ads is effectively ad fraud and you'll surely tank your IP reputation (incl. recaptcha and other 'IPs with malware/hacked IoT on them' lists).
      - jeroenhd 5y ago
        I can't be sad about my IP's reputation on ad networks. It's also not fraud unless I'm the one putting the ads on the internet. Their business model doesn't decide what links I do and do not click on my computer and in what way that clicking is being done. Their terms of service are meaningless because I never agreed to them and I do not have a contract with the ad companies telling me how to use my browser either. If they want me to stop clicking their ads, they can send me white rectangles without click listeners or hrefs. I've never heard of any IP filter that takes this stuff into account, do you know which lists care about ad networks?
jeroenhd 5y ago
I understand the idea here. Instead of having every website collect identifying behaviour through tracking and other forms of stalking, the browser provides the necessary information for ad companies to operate so it can work on blocking privacy invasions without nuking the data hoarder industries. This is probably in part because Google is in the ad business themselves and scummy ad companies could easily sue them for abusing their monopoly position if they just flat out blocked all data collection. The end result is still terrible. The only upside I can think of is that if this mechanism does find use in browsers, it could allow users to specify what ads they want to see rather than have corporate guesswork shove that stuff down their throats, and it could allow Chrome forks to fake this information. It's sad that the only real alternatives are Firefox, which has strange and unfathomable priorities, and Safari, which is held back by Apple's desire to make money off the app store (and their own bland of technical incompetence and bad policies). There was a brief moment where Microsoft Edge seemed like a great alternative to Chrome, with its new Spartan engine, but the past few months Microsoft has been ruining the likelihood I'll ever open it again with their terrible anti-features and even an integrated lure into debt.
danShumway 5y ago
Blegh, Google has to be pulled kicking and screaming towards a proposal where people actually control what information they share, inch by bloody inch. This is still just FLoC, just with slightly fewer awful bits and a different algorithm. We had FLoC, where the browser determined topics behind the scenes and users had zero control over anything. Now we have "topics" or whatever, which is still FLoC, it's just that now users can view their topics and turn them off, which is better -- but the browser is still determining all of your information in the background and auto-sending this to lots of websites. They still don't understand what the criticism was. ---- I've made this same comment multiple times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558). I really do feel like there is something deeply systemically wrong with how Google thinks about user agency in regards to data/preferences. I want to choose how I present online, and I want to be able to make that determination differently depending on the context. It's like saying that I want to choose what clothes I wear, and Google is saying, "okay, fine, we'll obviously still dress you, but if you don't like your shirt, you can tell us to change it, or you could even wear no clothes at all." No, get the heck out of my closet, I am capable of putting on my own clothes. I don't want to just be able to hide some information about myself, I don't want to make a choice over whether or not I present at all by turning the feature on/off, I don't want to exclude certain categories that I'm embarrassed about, I don't want to have a single one-size-fits all identity that goes to every website, I don't want my browser to try and guess what my identity is, I don't want a browser-maker deciding what categories are and aren't sensitive to me, and I don't want to be forced to justify how I present or to guarantee that every piece of information I give to every advertiser is accurate. I want to choose what (if any) persona I send to a website, on a website-by-website basis, and I want control over how that persona gets built, and I do not want that persona to change behind my back. I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here, but to me this is not a hard concept to grasp. The Topics API provides additional safeguards around FLoC, but does not change the fundamental nature of what FLoC is. It does not give me control over how I present online, it doesn't take Google out of the equation. And increasingly it seems that Google is just totally incapable of building a feature that gives me autonomy over anything without them stepping into the process. When Google builds a dressing room/wardrobe, they need to be inside the dressing room while I change. They have to be a third wheel in this process. They need to have some pointless AI process running to make sure everyone knows their engineers are smart, or some pointless fiddling phase where my interests change every week so that everyone knows that Google was important to this process. I hate that they are incapable of stepping out of the dressing room and letting me heckin dress myself.
zebracanevra 5y ago
I hope proposals like this are eventually accepted. I think it's safe to assume that we are trending towards: people caring more about privacy, browser fingerprinting getting harder, VPNs being standard (e.g. thanks to Apple), and third party cookies for tracking are either prevented by major browsers or governments have legislated against them. In that situation, at the end of the day, ads will still be here, and targeted ads are necessary for ads to be useful for both user and advertiser. These measures, where your user agent says what ads would be useful to you, seem perfect to me. For the average user, they give just enough info to ad providers to not be invasive, and for someone who absolutely does not want that, they could likely turn an option on to give random topics. Right now though, one can argue that this actually gives more data than before (i.e. tracking + topics instead of just tracking), but try to think about the situation in the future. (I'll still block ads.)
- kreeben 5y ago
  >> targeted ads are necessary In the TV era, they weren't. Targeting in the TV era meant selecting a program and deriving from that what my interests are. Selecting channel == choosing web site. That should be enough for advertisers, and then some.
  - zebracanevra 5y ago
    Google claims that untargeted ads bring in 52% of the revenue of targeted ads. https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency-choice-control/ https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency... IMO, untargeted random ads are just spam because they aren't relevant. It's like the crap on the back of a shopping receipt...
    - kreeben 5y ago
      If I rent a car using Google Chrome, the internet turns into a spam factory that tries its hardest to get me to rent another one. Targeted ads for the win?
    - emerongi 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ensorceled 5y ago
I've been thinking that something like topics is the actual solution for advertising so I'm not surprised that Google is trying to own this idea. For instance, I think that if, by legislation, the publisher was allowed to send to the ad network three interest codes AND NO OTHER INFO, I'd be ok with that. I'd also be ok with a minor degree of localization (dma or metro). The publishers could pick their three codes for all their users or, if they had some way of distinguishing "Sports Fan" from "Gaming Fan" IN THEIR OWN DATA they could send that (e.g. reddit would know my top three codes based on my subscriptions). Then just eliminate tracking and monitoring, again by legislation. Of course the list would have to be short, general and non intrusive. In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away, advertisers get a single targeting method. The ad tech industry stops eating the world. Content becomes king again. Google being in control of the codes, using their trove to choose the codes (in a suitable non-transparent mannter) while also reserving all that data for their own use is a huge problem.
- kreeben 5y ago
  >> In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away ... and in their place, instead of blockable cookies, we'll have something much more nefarious. Un-escapable advertisements.
marvinblum 5y ago
And why should browsers other than Chrome implement this?
- syrrim 5y ago
  Ads will bs served regardless. The user is likely interested in seeing relevant ads that suit their interests. The privacy impact is minimal.
archerx 5y ago
I can't wait to download an extension to block this.
- doopy1 5y ago
  It will probably just be a flag.
krono 5y ago
Walking a fine line here with regards to Art. 22 GDPR regarding automated decisions on behalf, and profiling of the individual [1]. This recent push of functionality that will make advertising look more private on the surface, another example of which is Edge's upcoming "Transparent Ads" [2] (whitelisted ads for trusted advertising partners), all of it merely prepwork for the day they sabotage ad blockers. The obvious next stage for them, after having successfully misdirected the narrative towards privacy being their primary use case. Google must hate human beings, the shit they're pulling lately makes it obvious. So, Roko's basilisk... is this how it begins? 1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ 2 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-transparent-ads-in-microsoft-edge-preview/m-p/3035970 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-...
- no_time 5y ago
  > the day they sabotage ad blockers Quite a few sites do this today. The most notable being facebook with their 100+ div way of writing "Sponsored". I don't see why google couldn't instruct site owners to self host doubleclick and apply some dynamic obfuscation for each visitor today. Surely not a law thing.
  - krono 5y ago
    Their upcoming outphasing of extension manifest 2 goes somewhat further than that. With this, they will also remove one of the primary APIs these content blockers require to function. I was wrong to assume everyone knew of this, and should have included a proper reference. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extension-manifest-v3-may-break-ublock-origin-content-blocker/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extens...
    - no_time 5y ago
      I am perfectly aware of the manifest V3 controversy, I just use FF on both phone and desktop. Meddling with the way doubleclick and google-analytics gets deployed on the web would effect all browsers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 5y ago
There’s a couple of important things to note here. First, the new Permissions-Policy: browsing-topics=() (or the old FLoC Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()) will ban this functionality, which is nice if you don’t want to leak your user’s data to Google for advertising purposes. I just checked and my site is still sending it so nothing to worry about here. Secondly, the initial list of topics can be found at https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md . “/Finance/Grants, Scholarships & Financial Aid” is interestingly scary as a target group. They’re also weirdly American (“/Finance/Insurance/Health Insurance”, putting reggae under “World Music”, etc.)
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Re: "weirdly American", I suspect that Google sourced the current topic list from an already existing list elsewhere. (Maybe the larger IAB list that is mentioned in the readme?) It seems unlikely Google would use some of these terms in the year of our Lord 2022. For instance, the category including the word "Shareware" seemed particularly turn of the millennium.
alkonaut 5y ago
This is a neat idea, and an improvement if and only if it’s actually used instead of other targeting techniques rather than in addition to. What are the odds of other fingerprinting and tracking techniques being dropped though?
tomjen3 5y ago
Just let me pick my own interests and then don't serve ads that insult those interests, like when I selected Atheism in my Facebook profile and then they advertised healing crystals to me. It seems Google has the same problem: they can't understand that I know what I am interested in, and that is not "travel and transportation", but it might be reasonably priced used cars and that trip to Estonia.

68 points by abraham 5y 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?

Ensorceled 5y 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.
- alyandon 5y 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.
  - judge2020 5y 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.
    - alyandon 5y 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.
yunohn 5y 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.

no_time 5y ago

Just tell me which lines do I need to modify in chromium to feed it fake data.

radiKal07 5y ago

Cool. Can I turn this feature off completly?

robin_reala 5y ago
Yes: Can I control the topics in my browser, or opt out completely? In Chrome settings, you will be able to find which topics have been generated based on your browsing history. You will be able to block specific topics or opt out of the Privacy Sandbox technologies completely.

Rygian 5y ago

"your browser determines a handful of topics" And that's where I stop reading. Now the software installed on my own devices is going to provide third-party sites with information about myself against my will?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gkbrk 5y ago
> against my will Is it really against your will if you install and use an application that costs millions to develop, provided to the user at zero cost, made by the biggest advertisement and customer profiling company?
- Rygian 5y ago
  The only situation where it would stop being "against my will" would be if Google advertised Chrome as "not a web browser, but rather a tool that I can use to leak my personal habits voluntarily."
- sebow 5y ago
  The 'you're the product' is a legitimate argument, but this argument makes sense only if you are aware of the phenomenon.When you think at the scale of Chrome/Firefox, it doesn't.The reason is simple: the average user is not aware of updates and changes (at all), especially those related to privacy and data.(Yes, despite the "transparency" commitments of Google/etc).Most people will still only see that the new firefox version introduced a new color theme or something equivalently useless. So kind of, yes, these are against the user's will.Now my proposed solution is straight-out stop using them, but since 95%+ of people can't do that, there's no simple solution.(besides the simplest most effective one)
- TruthWillHurt 5y ago
  You're forgetting the core - Chromium - is open-source.

kreeben 5y ago

>> With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history. Google's definition of what is a browser absolutely disgusts me. Please Firefox, Waterfox, Whateverfox, stay in the game for as long as you can because when you die, a piece of me will, too.

gzer0 5y ago
I find it the situation with Firefox and Google rather dire; Firefox seems to only be alive at this point because they receive annually $450 million USD from Google [1]. What happens when these payments disappears? Firefox is most definitely beholden to Google. Safari, seems to be the only real competitor right now, but again, Google is paying Apple ~$12 billion USD a year to be the default search engine there as well [2]. I know that the points I bring up relate to search engine dominance, but in a way, it extends much further than that. Firefox web browser is afloat solely because of these payments. [1] https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  If it forces Mozilla (the corp) to abandon their stupid side projects and refocus on developing Firefox, I'm all for a huge budget cut.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > If it forces Mozilla (the corp) to abandon their stupid side projects and refocus on developing Firefox, I'm all for a huge budget cut. Given the apparent reasoning behind the Servo team being laid off a couple of years ago, I don't think Mozilla's response to a budget cut would be a renewed focus on Firefox. I suspect that instead what users would get is yet another Chromium based browser... along with a bunch of side projects.

ohCh6zos 5y ago

Could an extension send back random topics to poison the well?

lelandfe 5y ago
YES. I love it. If Topics are simply determined by a user’s browsing history, perhaps loading a lot of junk in the background - or even manipulating Chrome’s history directly?
- moritonal 5y ago
  Well you've hit the nail on the head really. Unless it's signed somehow, what stopping Brave providing random to the websites, thus meaning they're unable to trust the result making the whole thing moot? Worse yet, if there is a signing process, that'd be a verifiable way of proving a user's client-browser, which is arguably worse.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Google banned it from the Chrome addon listing, but AdNauseam was built with somewhat the same idea: poisoning ad profiles by injecting fake user behaviour. It hides ads (it's based on uBlock Origin, after all) but it still loads all the scripts and clicks every ad it can detect to poison your ad profile and tell off advertisers. It can also present a nice overview of the banners clicked. The addon still works, but it seems to be in a state of limited maintenance.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Clicking ads is effectively ad fraud and you'll surely tank your IP reputation (incl. recaptcha and other 'IPs with malware/hacked IoT on them' lists).
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      I can't be sad about my IP's reputation on ad networks. It's also not fraud unless I'm the one putting the ads on the internet. Their business model doesn't decide what links I do and do not click on my computer and in what way that clicking is being done. Their terms of service are meaningless because I never agreed to them and I do not have a contract with the ad companies telling me how to use my browser either. If they want me to stop clicking their ads, they can send me white rectangles without click listeners or hrefs. I've never heard of any IP filter that takes this stuff into account, do you know which lists care about ad networks?

jeroenhd 5y ago

I understand the idea here. Instead of having every website collect identifying behaviour through tracking and other forms of stalking, the browser provides the necessary information for ad companies to operate so it can work on blocking privacy invasions without nuking the data hoarder industries. This is probably in part because Google is in the ad business themselves and scummy ad companies could easily sue them for abusing their monopoly position if they just flat out blocked all data collection. The end result is still terrible. The only upside I can think of is that if this mechanism does find use in browsers, it could allow users to specify what ads they want to see rather than have corporate guesswork shove that stuff down their throats, and it could allow Chrome forks to fake this information. It's sad that the only real alternatives are Firefox, which has strange and unfathomable priorities, and Safari, which is held back by Apple's desire to make money off the app store (and their own bland of technical incompetence and bad policies). There was a brief moment where Microsoft Edge seemed like a great alternative to Chrome, with its new Spartan engine, but the past few months Microsoft has been ruining the likelihood I'll ever open it again with their terrible anti-features and even an integrated lure into debt.

danShumway 5y ago

Blegh, Google has to be pulled kicking and screaming towards a proposal where people actually control what information they share, inch by bloody inch. This is still just FLoC, just with slightly fewer awful bits and a different algorithm. We had FLoC, where the browser determined topics behind the scenes and users had zero control over anything. Now we have "topics" or whatever, which is still FLoC, it's just that now users can view their topics and turn them off, which is better -- but the browser is still determining all of your information in the background and auto-sending this to lots of websites. They still don't understand what the criticism was. ---- I've made this same comment multiple times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558). I really do feel like there is something deeply systemically wrong with how Google thinks about user agency in regards to data/preferences. I want to choose how I present online, and I want to be able to make that determination differently depending on the context. It's like saying that I want to choose what clothes I wear, and Google is saying, "okay, fine, we'll obviously still dress you, but if you don't like your shirt, you can tell us to change it, or you could even wear no clothes at all." No, get the heck out of my closet, I am capable of putting on my own clothes. I don't want to just be able to hide some information about myself, I don't want to make a choice over whether or not I present at all by turning the feature on/off, I don't want to exclude certain categories that I'm embarrassed about, I don't want to have a single one-size-fits all identity that goes to every website, I don't want my browser to try and guess what my identity is, I don't want a browser-maker deciding what categories are and aren't sensitive to me, and I don't want to be forced to justify how I present or to guarantee that every piece of information I give to every advertiser is accurate. I want to choose what (if any) persona I send to a website, on a website-by-website basis, and I want control over how that persona gets built, and I do not want that persona to change behind my back. I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here, but to me this is not a hard concept to grasp. The Topics API provides additional safeguards around FLoC, but does not change the fundamental nature of what FLoC is. It does not give me control over how I present online, it doesn't take Google out of the equation. And increasingly it seems that Google is just totally incapable of building a feature that gives me autonomy over anything without them stepping into the process. When Google builds a dressing room/wardrobe, they need to be inside the dressing room while I change. They have to be a third wheel in this process. They need to have some pointless AI process running to make sure everyone knows their engineers are smart, or some pointless fiddling phase where my interests change every week so that everyone knows that Google was important to this process. I hate that they are incapable of stepping out of the dressing room and letting me heckin dress myself.

zebracanevra 5y ago

I hope proposals like this are eventually accepted. I think it's safe to assume that we are trending towards: people caring more about privacy, browser fingerprinting getting harder, VPNs being standard (e.g. thanks to Apple), and third party cookies for tracking are either prevented by major browsers or governments have legislated against them. In that situation, at the end of the day, ads will still be here, and targeted ads are necessary for ads to be useful for both user and advertiser. These measures, where your user agent says what ads would be useful to you, seem perfect to me. For the average user, they give just enough info to ad providers to not be invasive, and for someone who absolutely does not want that, they could likely turn an option on to give random topics. Right now though, one can argue that this actually gives more data than before (i.e. tracking + topics instead of just tracking), but try to think about the situation in the future. (I'll still block ads.)

kreeben 5y ago
>> targeted ads are necessary In the TV era, they weren't. Targeting in the TV era meant selecting a program and deriving from that what my interests are. Selecting channel == choosing web site. That should be enough for advertisers, and then some.
- zebracanevra 5y ago
  Google claims that untargeted ads bring in 52% of the revenue of targeted ads. https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency-choice-control/ https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency... IMO, untargeted random ads are just spam because they aren't relevant. It's like the crap on the back of a shopping receipt...
  - kreeben 5y ago
    If I rent a car using Google Chrome, the internet turns into a spam factory that tries its hardest to get me to rent another one. Targeted ads for the win?
  - emerongi 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Ensorceled 5y ago

I've been thinking that something like topics is the actual solution for advertising so I'm not surprised that Google is trying to own this idea. For instance, I think that if, by legislation, the publisher was allowed to send to the ad network three interest codes AND NO OTHER INFO, I'd be ok with that. I'd also be ok with a minor degree of localization (dma or metro). The publishers could pick their three codes for all their users or, if they had some way of distinguishing "Sports Fan" from "Gaming Fan" IN THEIR OWN DATA they could send that (e.g. reddit would know my top three codes based on my subscriptions). Then just eliminate tracking and monitoring, again by legislation. Of course the list would have to be short, general and non intrusive. In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away, advertisers get a single targeting method. The ad tech industry stops eating the world. Content becomes king again. Google being in control of the codes, using their trove to choose the codes (in a suitable non-transparent mannter) while also reserving all that data for their own use is a huge problem.

kreeben 5y ago
>> In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away ... and in their place, instead of blockable cookies, we'll have something much more nefarious. Un-escapable advertisements.

marvinblum 5y ago

And why should browsers other than Chrome implement this?

syrrim 5y ago
Ads will bs served regardless. The user is likely interested in seeing relevant ads that suit their interests. The privacy impact is minimal.

archerx 5y ago

I can't wait to download an extension to block this.

doopy1 5y ago
It will probably just be a flag.

krono 5y ago

Walking a fine line here with regards to Art. 22 GDPR regarding automated decisions on behalf, and profiling of the individual [1]. This recent push of functionality that will make advertising look more private on the surface, another example of which is Edge's upcoming "Transparent Ads" [2] (whitelisted ads for trusted advertising partners), all of it merely prepwork for the day they sabotage ad blockers. The obvious next stage for them, after having successfully misdirected the narrative towards privacy being their primary use case. Google must hate human beings, the shit they're pulling lately makes it obvious. So, Roko's basilisk... is this how it begins? 1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ 2 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-transparent-ads-in-microsoft-edge-preview/m-p/3035970 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-...

no_time 5y ago
> the day they sabotage ad blockers Quite a few sites do this today. The most notable being facebook with their 100+ div way of writing "Sponsored". I don't see why google couldn't instruct site owners to self host doubleclick and apply some dynamic obfuscation for each visitor today. Surely not a law thing.
- krono 5y ago
  Their upcoming outphasing of extension manifest 2 goes somewhat further than that. With this, they will also remove one of the primary APIs these content blockers require to function. I was wrong to assume everyone knew of this, and should have included a proper reference. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extension-manifest-v3-may-break-ublock-origin-content-blocker/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extens...
  - no_time 5y ago
    I am perfectly aware of the manifest V3 controversy, I just use FF on both phone and desktop. Meddling with the way doubleclick and google-analytics gets deployed on the web would effect all browsers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robin_reala 5y ago

There’s a couple of important things to note here. First, the new Permissions-Policy: browsing-topics=() (or the old FLoC Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()) will ban this functionality, which is nice if you don’t want to leak your user’s data to Google for advertising purposes. I just checked and my site is still sending it so nothing to worry about here. Secondly, the initial list of topics can be found at https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md . “/Finance/Grants, Scholarships & Financial Aid” is interestingly scary as a target group. They’re also weirdly American (“/Finance/Insurance/Health Insurance”, putting reggae under “World Music”, etc.)

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Re: "weirdly American", I suspect that Google sourced the current topic list from an already existing list elsewhere. (Maybe the larger IAB list that is mentioned in the readme?) It seems unlikely Google would use some of these terms in the year of our Lord 2022. For instance, the category including the word "Shareware" seemed particularly turn of the millennium.

alkonaut 5y ago

This is a neat idea, and an improvement if and only if it’s actually used instead of other targeting techniques rather than in addition to. What are the odds of other fingerprinting and tracking techniques being dropped though?

tomjen3 5y ago

Just let me pick my own interests and then don't serve ads that insult those interests, like when I selected Atheism in my Facebook profile and then they advertised healing crystals to me. It seems Google has the same problem: they can't understand that I know what I am interested in, and that is not "travel and transportation", but it might be reasonably priced used cars and that trip to Estonia.