4 ms·

Someone mean would say that this is not a bug, but a feature for the people who are paying for Chrome.

• sebzim4500 4y ago
  Google are the people paying for Chrome, they do not benefit in any way from this kind of fingerprinting. To the contrary, it decreases the value of their browser monopoly.
  • illiarian 4y ago
    > Google are the people paying for Chrome, they do not benefit in any way from this kind of fingerprinting. The largest ad company in the world 80% of whose money comes from online advertising does not benefit from tracking...
    • foldr 4y ago
      Even supposing that Google do benefit from it in that manner, there would be far simpler ways for them to make fingerprinting easier. It's extremely unlikely that this is a significant motivation for adding WebGPU. Not to mention that a lot of the fingerprinting you can potentially do with WebGPU can already be done with WebGL.
      • illiarian 4y ago
        Google has many hands in many pots. It's not that they are necessarily looking for easier ways to do fingerprinting. But they sure as hell wouldn't put up a fight to make it harder.
        • foldr 4y ago
          Then why does Chrome contain loads of features to make fingerprinting harder?
          • illiarian 4y ago
            Chrome has to walk a fine line between what it does for privacy and what is says it does. So you have the protection against fingerprinting and at the same time you have the FLoC fiasco
            • foldr 4y ago
              The simplest explanation is that the Chrome developers genuinely want to protect privacy and also genuinely want to add features. Every browser has to make that trade off. There are plenty of fingerprinting vulnerabilities in Firefox and Safari too. The reasoning here seems to be something like "Google is evil; X is an evil reason for doing Y; therefore Google must have done Y because of X". It's not a great argument.
              • illiarian 4y ago
                I can only quote Johnathan Nightingale, former executive of Mozilla, from his thread on how Google was sabotaging Firefox [1]: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional." [1] Thread: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
                • foldr 4y ago
                  That whole Twitter thread says nothing about fingerprinting or privacy. The first comment is close to gibberish, but seems to be mostly about some kind of Google office development project in Toronto. You are literally following the parody argument schema that I mentioned in my previous comment. You make some vague insinuations that Google is evil, then attribute everything it does to non-specific evil motivations. Even if Google is evil, this kind of reasoning is completely unconvincing.
                  • 4y ago
    • JoshTriplett 4y ago
      They don't benefit from fingerprinting, because the browser has all sorts of easier to track mechanisms available by default. Fingerprinting is for browsers that don't actively enable tracking.
    • jefftk 4y ago
      Google doesn't benefit because Google has committed not to fingerprint for ad targeting, but their competitors do.
      • illiarian 4y ago
        You've got it backwards.
        • jefftk 4y ago
          Google Ads, 2020-07-31: What is not acceptable is the use of opaque or hidden techniques that transfer data about individual users and allow them to be tracked in a covert manner, such as fingerprinting. We believe that any attempts to track people or obtain information that could identify them, without their knowledge and permission, should be blocked. We’ll continue to take a strong position against these practices. -- https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/improving-user-privacy-in-digital-advertising/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/improving-user-pri... Google Ads, 2021-03-03: Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products. -- https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... (I used to work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
          • illiarian 4y ago
            1. In the context of browsers Google's competitors are Safari and Firefox. And in this context Google is always consistently behind: either unwilling to implement the same privacy protections, or implementing them years later, or coming up with non-solutions 2. It's funny how you link to a Google propaganda piece on FLoC. Whereas Google's competitors (context: browsers) actually try to reduce fingerprinting, tracking, and thrid-party cookies, Google is trying to have the cake and eat it too with FLoC. Which was such a blatant attempt to keep fingerprinting and tracking alive that everyone immediately disabled it within months of Google's experiments with it. Edit: Tracking and fingerprinting is Google's bread and butter, literally: 80% of its money comes from targeted advertising.
    • sebzim4500 4y ago
      Of course they do, but they want to allow fingerprinting in ways that only Google gets the data (i.e. spying on chrome users)