21 ms·

Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

505 points by _cnhi 3y ago

Aardwolf 3y ago
> Additionally, there are features such as Protected Audience that can serve you ads for “remarketing” (for example, Chrome tracked you visiting a listing for a toaster, so now you will get ads for toasters elsewhere), and Attribution Reporting, that gathers data on ad clicks. Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toasters still be relevant?
- dncornholio 3y ago
  This is already a solved problem, you can exclude audience based on purchase.
- Nathanba 3y ago
  you could still return it when you see a better toaster on an ad. It's probably a stronger signal than what they could otherwise get
- havnagiggle 3y ago
  Because they don't know if you bought it or not. They are gambling that you didn't and are trying to capture a sale for the ad buyer. Presumably that is somewhat effective since it's so common.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    Amazon still re-shows toaster ads when they know for certain you've bought one. Maybe the likelihood you're buying one for someone else as a gift is higher than their guess of what else you might buy?
    - Bad_CRC 3y ago
      Some items on amazon shows on a "buy it again" list, I've some appliances appear there after a couple of years...
    - thejohnconway 3y ago
      I’ve always thought it was because you’re more likely that you’ll buy another toaster than something in any other individual category. More likely that your next purchase will be another toaster than a pitchfork, for example. Still stupid though.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        I always opt for the toaster-pitchfork bundle with monthly subscription from Prime, because a toaster would be nothing without its accompanying pitchfork!
    - havnagiggle 3y ago
      Maybe, but I'll suggest an alternative view that's probably unpopular: big ad companies walk a fine line between what knowledge they can share even from _inside_ the same company. Ad sellers cannot have perfect information for probably several reasons: auditing, privacy, safety, and legal. Evidence of this is that ads are reported as being encrypted between business units (e.g. if you work on ranking product listings, you may no idea what ad is injected at the top). Obviously the result looks stupid to us as consumers which is quite memorable. I suggest it is a by-product of intentional choices. IMO this is a better explanation than "oh this company is just too stupid to do it right, but also they are all knowing about everything you do and are just so doggone evil." Maybe they are that evil, but I am sure they have learned how not to overturn their apple cart and this is an obvious result of that.
      - tyingq 3y ago
        I see language in Amazon's ad seller pages like: "We will always automatically exclude recent past purchasers of your promoted products." So there's some notion of this data being available, at least internally.
- melx 3y ago
  Let's take the toaster out of context here and then if that's just a "product" and the brands/governments want you to purchase it frequently that's why.
- stranded22 3y ago
  They think you are in ‘research’ mode - so you are more likely to be looking at the various toasters in the market, reviews etc. I expect most people research before buying a specific toaster.
- imiric 3y ago
  Because you'd likely want to buy a new toaster in a few months, after the one you just bought breaks due to planned obsolescence, or low quality parts, poor QA, and no possibility to fix it yourself. /s Those advertisers, they think of everything. :)
- cheeko1234 3y ago
  Me visiting a listing for a toaster means that I'm in the market for a toaster, doesn't necessarily imply I already bought one. Also, with this data, they can potentially build a better model than Amazon's recommender model. Most consumers have a pattern when buying and there's a lot of money in figuring it out.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mlnj 3y ago
  When I have my ad defenses down (no ad blocking, some random browser), I see ads for mobile cases for my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (released in 2012). I guess that was the last set of data points they have against my persona. That's the only relevant ad I see that I remember searching for. I've had 3 other phones since then. Ads just show what they can. Still better chances for a click than random.
- wirthjason 3y ago
  Hot take (as it applies to toasters): many appliances are crap, they break quickly and are not user repairable. The odds of buying a toaster a year later might be higher than it sounds.
- n_ary 3y ago
  There is a likely chance that you didn’t buy it, so bombarding you with other toaster ads(preferably much cheaper) raises the chance of you actually buying it. There might be other cases where you bought one and is really happy about the benefits and want your friends to enjoy too but may be they can buy a different brand/price/featured ones to compare experience. There are lots of possible such cases ad and sales people think up. Src: worked in adtech for few years and yes am not proud.
input_sh 3y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+sandbox https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+sandbox It's been discussed to death so many times already.
sshine 3y ago
https://getfirefox.com https://getfirefox.com
- mlnj 3y ago
  Consistently working as the better browser. Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience. Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data. Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants. Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.
  - smarkov 3y ago
    > Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/independent-voices/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in... [2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      I don't get this Firefox hate. I use Firefox and I'm pretty happy with it and the product's direction. I'm also fine igoring products and features that I'm not interested in.
      - sshine 3y ago
CSDude 3y ago
Does anyone know the MDM settings to disable it for everyone in our org? I could not find here: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/# https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#
- vwelling 3y ago
  These are the settings you're looking for: * PrivacySandboxAdMeasurementEnabled * PrivacySandboxAdTopicsEnabled * PrivacySandboxPromptEnabled * PrivacySandboxSiteEnabledAdsEnabled
starbugs 3y ago
This appears to be the same as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227 Top comment on that one was: Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL: chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages. Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.
- jwr 3y ago
  If enough people switch these settings off, Google will just re-enable them "accidentally" during the next auto-update. Or hide them altogether. This is their business model. They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet. And since their business model relies on tracking people, that is what they will do. Refusing by deleting Chrome is the only way to oppose this. Incidentally, I think people working on these features should be ashamed.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    It already “accidentally” enables two of them when you are prompted to enable the new one and you say no…
  - cesarb 3y ago
    > They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet. IIRC, it's the opposite: Chrome was created to prevent other browser manufacturers (in particular, Microsoft) from imposing their rules on the Internet in a way which affected Google websites.
    - justin_oaks 3y ago
      So another instance of "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." I'm not fan of seeing which tech giant wins the privilege of imposing their will on me.
    - jwr 3y ago
runnig 3y ago
If I disable this feature, will ads target me with the old cookie methods?
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Yes. They will also do so if you keep the feature on. Third-party cookies in Chrome won't be blocked for the near-term future at least. Unless you switch browsers - e.g. Firefox has blocked third-party cookies for a while now.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    There's an option in the settings to block third-party cookies. Does that no do what it says?
    - dbbk 3y ago
      It does, it's just not on by default yet. You can turn it on now if you want to get ahead of the curve.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Yes. You can also disable the new Google topics system.
      - vladvasiliu 3y ago
        Is that the `chrome://settings/adPrivacy` thing that I've seen in another comment? Is that Chrome-only? On Chromium 117.0.5938.48, it sends me to the settings home page.
  - dbbk 3y ago
    Chrome is scheduled to drop third-party cookies mid-2024.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yep, and else with browser fingerprinting; https://amiunique.org/fingerprint https://amiunique.org/fingerprint says that even with adblock and some tracking measures turned off, my browser fingerprint is still unique among 2054475 others.
alexvitkov 3y ago
> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. fuck off
- notoverthere 3y ago
  This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards. Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details. Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Now you gave me an idea: We gonna launch a start-up working on an AI-based reminder calendar app. And in order to improve the invest... ahm, user experience we gonna track them across the web to enable our AI to propose futire reminders!
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial. The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.
    - acidictadpole 3y ago
      It's less controversial but also not really relevant. Those kinds of reminders shouldn't be using cookies, and don't need to.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
oldnet 3y ago
I uninstalled chrome & switched to Brave (I know about core) when I couldn't disable chrome auto update. I have firefox too.
- notoverthere 3y ago
  > (I know about core) What is core?
- matwood 3y ago
  I used Brave for awhile, but it got too crypto which made it feel scammy.
  - travoc 3y ago
    At least the crypto ads are really easy to turn off.
  - pluijzer 3y ago
    Brave gives me a strong negative gut reaction. I really doubt crypto goes well with ethics. Looking at some of Brave's past transgressions confirms it for me. Sure, you can turn it off, just like you can remove the pineapple from pizza, the pizza is still ruined though.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > Sure, you can turn it off, just like you can remove the pineapple from pizza, the pizza is still ruined though. I like this analogy; pineapple on pizza is just like a browser that runs a crypto miner.
      - NayamAmarshe 3y ago
        > runs a crypto miner No it doesn't.
    - NayamAmarshe 3y ago
      You don't need to turn it off, because it's off by default.
jlpcsl 3y ago
Just stop being a helpless victim and get rid of this evil corporate spyware and switch to a privacy-respecting browser like Firefox, or even better LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I know the goal of LibreWolf is privacy, but logging out of everything on every session was enough for me to deal with the 'privacy' problem. Maybe because I have adblock, but I just don't get these ads other people talk about.
  - _joel 3y ago
    Logging out doesn't clear tracking cookies, adblock might. (uBlock origin user here as adblock had some dodgy company take it over iirc)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 93po 3y ago
    This will do nothing to prevent browser fingerprinting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
vladharbuz 3y ago
Delete Chrome. “The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.” https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-and-how-it-works https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...
- n_ary 3y ago
  In other words, google knows so much about the visitor to be screwed by regulation, hence they want to wrap the coarse-grained moat as helpful topics for advertisers. Meanwhile not exactly share that info with anyone to not lose their moat benefit either by removing third-party cookies effectively killing other data harvesters’ moats and become the one true eye of sauron(or politely called as monopoly).
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    But the topics API is available to anyone to use right? So in a way they're getting rid of their moat because they're closing down a datasource where they are market leading and opening up a new data source where everyone gets access for free. Seems like a bad business move to me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
esteth 3y ago
Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. If chrome is able to turn off third-party cookies for a large swathe of people, I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies. I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
- ShowalkKama 3y ago
  >but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. not really, no. From my experience most stuff works fine (the thing that breaks websites the most is webgl and even then, only the few websites that really need it use it)
  - dbbk 3y ago
    You would be surprised at what breaks. It also prevents local storage (not just cookies) from working at all when inside an iframe. That took me a long time at work to debug. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67645164/cross-domain-local-storage-using-iframes-block-third-party-cookies https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67645164/cross-domain-lo...
    - sneak 3y ago
      More importantly, instead of silently failing like localStorage should, the attribute on the window object is missing, causing page scripts that don't catch the exception (ie all of them) to crash and usually break the page. I'm pretty sure Google is making disabling cookies as painful and breakage-inducing as possible to make sure people don't flip the switch.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shkolarac 3y ago
I don't know if it is common knowledge, but only firefox offers application-level control Manual proxyis. (At least on win 10, I didn't check on others). This feature alone makes Chrome / Edge unusable, at least for me.
Andrew018 3y ago
It's essential to stay vigilant about online privacy. Consider exploring alternative browsers or privacy settings to protect your digital footprint. Also, check out AC Football Cases
kome 3y ago
Just for a little and silly laugh https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/111027233991200762 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/111027233991200762 "ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee"
AugustoCAS 3y ago
Just to join the chorus (as I'm listening to Agnus Dei by Barber) Firefox + uBlock Origin (too lazy to use uMatrix) + privacy badger (because why not) + multi account containers + User agent switcher (for sites which want something else and refuse to load on FF, e.g. bing chat)
borbulon 3y ago
I am against this and think it's pretty unconscionable, but I will say this in defense of Google collecting my data: Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run. That being said, it's been proven over and over and over that behavioral ad sales don't actually result in more clicks or sales for the advertiser. I've been using FF with some privacy extensions and settings as my personal browser for a few years now, I'm definitely not going to change that now.
- mavhc 3y ago
  Isn't their business model mostly: Having the most popular search engine?
  - mrcarruthers 3y ago
    That doesn't make money. Have the most popular search engine so they can sell more ads is more like it.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Also so they can basically shape web standards and ecosystems however they want. Websites will do literally anything to stay listed and relevant in google search. Google does this by shaping a web that serves ads and thereby makes them more money
    - mavhc 3y ago
      Right, being able to sell the most ads because you have the most page views about something people are specifically interested in
  - tantalor 3y ago
    Search is the moat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat
dspillett 3y ago
Also, when it asks you if you want to turn it on and you say “hell, no”, it will turn on a couple of other settings while it is turning that one off. Make sure you go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy and review and re-disable those. Or switch browser, which I have done on my personal machines.
- 93po 3y ago
  Changing settings is useless. They will at some point “reengineer” settings with auto opt in and revert your decisions Just get Firefox
honeybadger1 3y ago
The article is gaslighting it's readers
fdfdfdf55 3y ago
At the same time, I notice that since recently, youtube with ublock and firefox is pretty much unusable. Time for anti trust to step in.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Firefox is better. I had no issues switching recently.
_8j50 3y ago
Is there a legal or data privacy angle here in enterprise environments where Chrome can be banned due to their sharing of private/internal browsing history with third parties?
ericpauley 3y ago
The most important point to make here (and one missing from the article) is that Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While one may argue browsers should have neither, enabling topics is not reducing user privacy if TPC is already enabled.
MrDirkGently 3y ago
If I'm using Chrome only to test how websites render in it, what are the alternatives? Use another Chromium based browser or do they have the same issues as Chrome? Use a browser testing suite such as BrowserStack? Or will using a user-agent switcher in Firefox achieve the same effect as using Chrome?
- NayamAmarshe 3y ago
  I use Brave, it's great for web development.
- maccard 3y ago
  Use chrome for that, but Firefox for everything else.
- sp332 3y ago
  Put a "best viewed in Safari" badge on it and stop testing in Chrome. If you want to know how an average user will see your site, you should probably be testing with a default profile, with no adblocker. You could leave the browser signed out of your Google account, or have a separate one just for this.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
Ars' (and lobste.rs') take on this [1] is titled "Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome" - with Google cookies and ads on the page ofc. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
jameshush 3y ago
We have a few options for monetizing on the web: 1. Sell stuff (e-commerce, subscriptions, services). 2. Sell ads (every website that's free except Wikipedia). 3. Ask for donations (Wikipedia). I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die. To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website). We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads Not really. You just need to look at any normal billboard; advertisers bought that billboard, even though it knows nothing about demographics or "attribution". Tracking just makes advertising more cost-effective. To the advertiser, not to me. I'm not an advertiser; I gain nothing from the cheapness of advertising. It makes no difference to me whether an ad is targeted or not; I don't want to see it. Especially if it writhes and wriggles distractingly, or autoplays video.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    billboard ads are a drop of the bucket compared to everything.
- hnben 3y ago
  I think I agree with you, but I would add another option: buy subscription services. These services have a strong incentive to keep their userbase happy. > If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die. beautiful
- 3y ago
Havoc 3y ago
> Chrome will track user data for the benefit of advertisers. The entitlement mentality towards user behavioural data is wild
- pulpfictional 3y ago
  Why?
pjmlp 3y ago
Enjoy your Electron based apps, folks.
sh4rks 3y ago
Unrelated, but the other day, I searched something on DDGo on Firefox mobile in private mode, and a few hours later, I see a targeted ad related to that search. Whats the deal with that? The only extension I have installed is Ublock mobile.
- hskdhdkshs 3y ago
  that's the usual targeting we know and love since early 2000s. we are talking about something worse.
- asgerhb 3y ago
  If you can reliably recreate this, then you may be on to something interesting. I couldn't guess what. Otherwise, the most likely answer is coincidence.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  IP address? Or coincidence?
- lyvxh 3y ago
  Well, it might be a coincidence, but it also wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't. Your identity was probably linked using fingerprinting. Private browsing mode offers almost zero protection against this. Even Tor isn't protected unless you enable the Safest security level (= completely disable JavaScript). This might even be done through multiple levels of indirection (mobile browser fingerprint -> Google account -> desktop browser fingerprint).
dewdwedee 3y ago
[flagged]
Phemist 3y ago
So, I've heard it said in another topic on `Topics` that a single list of topics, as far as it is an identifier for a specific person, is far less accurate than a tracking cookie (or similar technology). Well, yes, maybe that is the case _right now_, but these are convenient arguments to push the technology through. There is nothing inherent to the technology that would prevent the `Topics` from being split such that 8 billion (current world population) unique combinations of topics exist. If all topics are completely orthogonal to others, such that the existence of one topic for some user does not give extra information of another topic existing for the same user, we would expect a list of log2(8 billion) ~= 33 topics to suffice as a unique identifier for each individual user, _reported by the browser to every single website that is visited_. So... obviously there is no technological limitation to this list of topics, it is completely feasible to design a list of 33 (or a little bit more) topics in this way.. so what will keep Google from not introducing more topics (as time goes on and people become accustomed to this feature)? My point, in the limit, potentially a few years from now, this feature will be "pareto-dominant" of tracking cookies, or rather in all aspects better at tracking users than tracking cookies ever were.
- lifeinthevoid 3y ago
  yeah and it's far more convenient to delete cookies than to delete your whole browsing history.
umrashrf 3y ago
moving away from google chrome as we speak
tannhaeuser 3y ago
High time to require unbundling of Chrome on Android, like was done with IE on Windows back then. In EU, that is.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers. No PC operating system that I know of aside from ChromeOS bundles Chrome, yet people still download it and it’s still dominant. What makes you think the outcome would be different if given a choice? Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser. And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
  - tannhaeuser 3y ago
    > And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers. Did it not help FF to gain initial market share? > Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser. No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway (and in fact as the first thing after initial setup), and the reason is the incredible bloatedness and lack of scope of browsers. > And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google. This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen (payment, school, administration, health care, and so on); no idea what that has to with using Android or other Google products.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      > Did it not help FF to gain initial market share? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windows-browser-ballot-comes-to-an-end-as-ec-obligation-expires/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo... While there were early signs that the browser ballot screen was influencing browser usage in the EU, with Mozilla attributing some European Firefox growth to the selection page, long-term trends strongly suggest that it was next to useless. In spite of equally prominent placement on the selection screen, Opera's share even within Europe appears to have declined over the last five years. So too have Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chrome, however, has experienced significant growth. > No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway I can’t speak to Android. But iOS updates (which include Safari updates) don’t happen that often and at least users have a usable browser at initial launch on both iOS and Android. You can choose when to update > This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen I don’t know, maybe because the original submission is about Chrome’s privacy issues, not about the “open web”?
jklinger410 3y ago
HN in shambles
sergiotapia 3y ago
Does this affect Brave or will they also stripe out this nonsense?
_chu1 3y ago
There are people in the comments saying Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome but modern computers are genuinely so fast I can't notice a difference. At least on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad T61 I use regularly I have to do some comparisons on what the best browser choice is but on my main PC with a Ryzen 5 7600 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM it hasn't even really occurred that one is faster than the other. I use LibreWolf.
- 93po 3y ago
  I can comment that FF feels slower on iOS but it makes so little difference these days. We’re talking small fractions of a second.
  - bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
    Don't all browsers on iOS have to use Safari for rendering?
    - 93po 3y ago
      I believe you're correct but and maybe it's placebo but there is some process of loading and viewing a web page that feels faster in safari. maybe safari does some sort of pre-fetching? i barely use it so even my anecdotal sample size is not large
      - bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
        In fairness, there's an arbitrary amount of "chrome" on top of Safari, so Firefox could very well be slower. There's also this new profile effect where switching browsers always seems faster. The reasoning is that you're comparing browser A, which is loaded down with all your history, cookies, etc. against browser B, which has a clean slate.
lifeinthevoid 3y ago
I've read an interesting comment on lobste.rs that this is basically a way to try to circumvent GDPR.
oehpr 3y ago
... does this article seem a little low quality to anyone else? > By far the most private browsers are specialist non-tracking browsers that prioritise no tracking, such as DuckDuckGo... wha??? > Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. Wha?! The technology google is deploying wouldn't even support that. Frankly the level of personal invasion required to achieve this... Was this just like a bit of biting sarcasm or something? Dry wit that flew over my head? This article seems off.
- sp332 3y ago
  The comment about DuckDuckGo seems fine?
  - oehpr 3y ago
    ... wuh? OH THEY MADE AN ANDROID BROWSER. ok. In my defense I did consider "DuckDuckGo made a browser"? and googled it before I posted this comment, but I did not find any results. Your comment made me dig deeper to find the Android one. I still think that sentence is a bit stilted though, it's got some department of redundancy department vibes. But I yield the point on that one.
ChicagoDave 3y ago
I stopped using Chrome two years ago. I deleted the Facebook app. I have blockers on my desktop and iPhone. I’m aware everyone’s PI info is already compromised, but I’m not adding fuel. There are excellent alternatives to Chrome. I encourage everyone to adopt one.
- sp332 3y ago
  What are you using for iPhone?
  - starbugs 3y ago
    Brave
i_love_cookies 3y ago
[dead]
ulfw 3y ago
People who use an ad company's browser cannot be helped and shouldn't complain.
standardUser 3y ago
Can I just tell Google what I like and then they serve me ads for those things only? Because the current scheme seems like a whole lot of unnecessary subterfuge just to reliably serve me ads I will never click on. Wouldn't they rather have a shot in hell of serving me an ad I might actually click, while also not turning themselves into the poster boys for online privacy violations?
l72 3y ago
If the topics API is really just returning a list of things the user is interested in, like: 2: 'Arts & Entertainment/Acting & Theater', 3: 'Arts & Entertainment/Comics', ... 132: 'Computers & Electronics/Consumer Electronics/Home Theater Systems', ... 208: 'Home & Garden/Gardening', ... why not just have a simple survey and let the user pick or rate what they are interested in? Why the need to have the web browser actually track everything?
- l72 3y ago
  Also, there should be a permission API around this for each website (like camera/microphone), that explicitly states why the website is requesting this information and what information the browser will return to the website.
bradgessler 3y ago
What’s crazy to me is how many people in the forum continue to run Chrome. There’s barely any mention of switching off Chrome in this thread until scrolling down towards the bottom of the comments. Why is that? It’s so obvious how this story is doing to end—Google will do everything in their power to shove ads down Chrome users throats no matter how many ad blockers people try to run. What is it about Chrome that makes it so much better than alternatives like Firefox, Safari, or any Blink engine variants that aren’t spyware?
kimown 3y ago
Q: Why google search use scroll instead of pagination? A: Sell more ads to users.

505 points by _cnhi 3y ago

> Additionally, there are features such as Protected Audience that can serve you ads for “remarketing” (for example, Chrome tracked you visiting a listing for a toaster, so now you will get ads for toasters elsewhere), and Attribution Reporting, that gathers data on ad clicks. Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toasters still be relevant?

dncornholio 3y ago
This is already a solved problem, you can exclude audience based on purchase.
Nathanba 3y ago
you could still return it when you see a better toaster on an ad. It's probably a stronger signal than what they could otherwise get
havnagiggle 3y ago
Because they don't know if you bought it or not. They are gambling that you didn't and are trying to capture a sale for the ad buyer. Presumably that is somewhat effective since it's so common.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Amazon still re-shows toaster ads when they know for certain you've bought one. Maybe the likelihood you're buying one for someone else as a gift is higher than their guess of what else you might buy?
  - Bad_CRC 3y ago
    Some items on amazon shows on a "buy it again" list, I've some appliances appear there after a couple of years...
  - thejohnconway 3y ago
    I’ve always thought it was because you’re more likely that you’ll buy another toaster than something in any other individual category. More likely that your next purchase will be another toaster than a pitchfork, for example. Still stupid though.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      I always opt for the toaster-pitchfork bundle with monthly subscription from Prime, because a toaster would be nothing without its accompanying pitchfork!
  - havnagiggle 3y ago
    Maybe, but I'll suggest an alternative view that's probably unpopular: big ad companies walk a fine line between what knowledge they can share even from _inside_ the same company. Ad sellers cannot have perfect information for probably several reasons: auditing, privacy, safety, and legal. Evidence of this is that ads are reported as being encrypted between business units (e.g. if you work on ranking product listings, you may no idea what ad is injected at the top). Obviously the result looks stupid to us as consumers which is quite memorable. I suggest it is a by-product of intentional choices. IMO this is a better explanation than "oh this company is just too stupid to do it right, but also they are all knowing about everything you do and are just so doggone evil." Maybe they are that evil, but I am sure they have learned how not to overturn their apple cart and this is an obvious result of that.
    - tyingq 3y ago
      I see language in Amazon's ad seller pages like: "We will always automatically exclude recent past purchasers of your promoted products." So there's some notion of this data being available, at least internally.
melx 3y ago
Let's take the toaster out of context here and then if that's just a "product" and the brands/governments want you to purchase it frequently that's why.
stranded22 3y ago
They think you are in ‘research’ mode - so you are more likely to be looking at the various toasters in the market, reviews etc. I expect most people research before buying a specific toaster.
imiric 3y ago
Because you'd likely want to buy a new toaster in a few months, after the one you just bought breaks due to planned obsolescence, or low quality parts, poor QA, and no possibility to fix it yourself. /s Those advertisers, they think of everything. :)
cheeko1234 3y ago
Me visiting a listing for a toaster means that I'm in the market for a toaster, doesn't necessarily imply I already bought one. Also, with this data, they can potentially build a better model than Amazon's recommender model. Most consumers have a pattern when buying and there's a lot of money in figuring it out.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mlnj 3y ago
When I have my ad defenses down (no ad blocking, some random browser), I see ads for mobile cases for my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (released in 2012). I guess that was the last set of data points they have against my persona. That's the only relevant ad I see that I remember searching for. I've had 3 other phones since then. Ads just show what they can. Still better chances for a click than random.
wirthjason 3y ago
Hot take (as it applies to toasters): many appliances are crap, they break quickly and are not user repairable. The odds of buying a toaster a year later might be higher than it sounds.
n_ary 3y ago
There is a likely chance that you didn’t buy it, so bombarding you with other toaster ads(preferably much cheaper) raises the chance of you actually buying it. There might be other cases where you bought one and is really happy about the benefits and want your friends to enjoy too but may be they can buy a different brand/price/featured ones to compare experience. There are lots of possible such cases ad and sales people think up. Src: worked in adtech for few years and yes am not proud.

input_sh 3y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+sandbox https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+sandbox It's been discussed to death so many times already.

sshine 3y ago

https://getfirefox.com https://getfirefox.com

mlnj 3y ago
Consistently working as the better browser. Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience. Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data. Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants. Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.
- smarkov 3y ago
  > Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/independent-voices/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in... [2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    I don't get this Firefox hate. I use Firefox and I'm pretty happy with it and the product's direction. I'm also fine igoring products and features that I'm not interested in.
    - sshine 3y ago

CSDude 3y ago

Does anyone know the MDM settings to disable it for everyone in our org? I could not find here: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/# https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#

vwelling 3y ago
These are the settings you're looking for: * PrivacySandboxAdMeasurementEnabled * PrivacySandboxAdTopicsEnabled * PrivacySandboxPromptEnabled * PrivacySandboxSiteEnabledAdsEnabled

starbugs 3y ago

This appears to be the same as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227 Top comment on that one was: Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL: chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages. Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.

jwr 3y ago
If enough people switch these settings off, Google will just re-enable them "accidentally" during the next auto-update. Or hide them altogether. This is their business model. They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet. And since their business model relies on tracking people, that is what they will do. Refusing by deleting Chrome is the only way to oppose this. Incidentally, I think people working on these features should be ashamed.
- dspillett 3y ago
  It already “accidentally” enables two of them when you are prompted to enable the new one and you say no…
- cesarb 3y ago
  > They didn't create Chrome out of the goodness of their hearts: it was created to impose their rules on the internet. IIRC, it's the opposite: Chrome was created to prevent other browser manufacturers (in particular, Microsoft) from imposing their rules on the Internet in a way which affected Google websites.
  - justin_oaks 3y ago
    So another instance of "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." I'm not fan of seeing which tech giant wins the privilege of imposing their will on me.
  - jwr 3y ago

runnig 3y ago

If I disable this feature, will ads target me with the old cookie methods?

Vinnl 3y ago
Yes. They will also do so if you keep the feature on. Third-party cookies in Chrome won't be blocked for the near-term future at least. Unless you switch browsers - e.g. Firefox has blocked third-party cookies for a while now.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  There's an option in the settings to block third-party cookies. Does that no do what it says?
  - dbbk 3y ago
    It does, it's just not on by default yet. You can turn it on now if you want to get ahead of the curve.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Yes. You can also disable the new Google topics system.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Is that the `chrome://settings/adPrivacy` thing that I've seen in another comment? Is that Chrome-only? On Chromium 117.0.5938.48, it sends me to the settings home page.
- dbbk 3y ago
  Chrome is scheduled to drop third-party cookies mid-2024.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Yep, and else with browser fingerprinting; https://amiunique.org/fingerprint https://amiunique.org/fingerprint says that even with adblock and some tracking measures turned off, my browser fingerprint is still unique among 2054475 others.

alexvitkov 3y ago

> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. fuck off

notoverthere 3y ago
This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards. Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details. Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Now you gave me an idea: We gonna launch a start-up working on an AI-based reminder calendar app. And in order to improve the invest... ahm, user experience we gonna track them across the web to enable our AI to propose futire reminders!
- mulmen 3y ago
  I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial. The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.
  - acidictadpole 3y ago
    It's less controversial but also not really relevant. Those kinds of reminders shouldn't be using cookies, and don't need to.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

oldnet 3y ago

I uninstalled chrome & switched to Brave (I know about core) when I couldn't disable chrome auto update. I have firefox too.

notoverthere 3y ago
> (I know about core) What is core?
matwood 3y ago
I used Brave for awhile, but it got too crypto which made it feel scammy.
- travoc 3y ago
  At least the crypto ads are really easy to turn off.
- pluijzer 3y ago
  Brave gives me a strong negative gut reaction. I really doubt crypto goes well with ethics. Looking at some of Brave's past transgressions confirms it for me. Sure, you can turn it off, just like you can remove the pineapple from pizza, the pizza is still ruined though.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Sure, you can turn it off, just like you can remove the pineapple from pizza, the pizza is still ruined though. I like this analogy; pineapple on pizza is just like a browser that runs a crypto miner.
    - NayamAmarshe 3y ago
      > runs a crypto miner No it doesn't.
  - NayamAmarshe 3y ago
    You don't need to turn it off, because it's off by default.

jlpcsl 3y ago

Just stop being a helpless victim and get rid of this evil corporate spyware and switch to a privacy-respecting browser like Firefox, or even better LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/

hospitalJail 3y ago
I know the goal of LibreWolf is privacy, but logging out of everything on every session was enough for me to deal with the 'privacy' problem. Maybe because I have adblock, but I just don't get these ads other people talk about.
- _joel 3y ago
  Logging out doesn't clear tracking cookies, adblock might. (uBlock origin user here as adblock had some dodgy company take it over iirc)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 93po 3y ago
  This will do nothing to prevent browser fingerprinting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

vladharbuz 3y ago

Delete Chrome. “The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.” https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-and-how-it-works https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

n_ary 3y ago
In other words, google knows so much about the visitor to be screwed by regulation, hence they want to wrap the coarse-grained moat as helpful topics for advertisers. Meanwhile not exactly share that info with anyone to not lose their moat benefit either by removing third-party cookies effectively killing other data harvesters’ moats and become the one true eye of sauron(or politely called as monopoly).
- londons_explore 3y ago
  But the topics API is available to anyone to use right? So in a way they're getting rid of their moat because they're closing down a datasource where they are market leading and opening up a new data source where everyone gets access for free. Seems like a bad business move to me.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

esteth 3y ago

Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. If chrome is able to turn off third-party cookies for a large swathe of people, I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies. I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.

ShowalkKama 3y ago
>but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. not really, no. From my experience most stuff works fine (the thing that breaks websites the most is webgl and even then, only the few websites that really need it use it)
- dbbk 3y ago
  You would be surprised at what breaks. It also prevents local storage (not just cookies) from working at all when inside an iframe. That took me a long time at work to debug. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67645164/cross-domain-local-storage-using-iframes-block-third-party-cookies https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67645164/cross-domain-lo...
  - sneak 3y ago
    More importantly, instead of silently failing like localStorage should, the attribute on the window object is missing, causing page scripts that don't catch the exception (ie all of them) to crash and usually break the page. I'm pretty sure Google is making disabling cookies as painful and breakage-inducing as possible to make sure people don't flip the switch.
madeofpalk 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shkolarac 3y ago

I don't know if it is common knowledge, but only firefox offers application-level control Manual proxyis. (At least on win 10, I didn't check on others). This feature alone makes Chrome / Edge unusable, at least for me.

Andrew018 3y ago

It's essential to stay vigilant about online privacy. Consider exploring alternative browsers or privacy settings to protect your digital footprint. Also, check out AC Football Cases

kome 3y ago

Just for a little and silly laugh https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/111027233991200762 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/111027233991200762 "ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee"

AugustoCAS 3y ago

Just to join the chorus (as I'm listening to Agnus Dei by Barber) Firefox + uBlock Origin (too lazy to use uMatrix) + privacy badger (because why not) + multi account containers + User agent switcher (for sites which want something else and refuse to load on FF, e.g. bing chat)

borbulon 3y ago

I am against this and think it's pretty unconscionable, but I will say this in defense of Google collecting my data: Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run. That being said, it's been proven over and over and over that behavioral ad sales don't actually result in more clicks or sales for the advertiser. I've been using FF with some privacy extensions and settings as my personal browser for a few years now, I'm definitely not going to change that now.

mavhc 3y ago
Isn't their business model mostly: Having the most popular search engine?
- mrcarruthers 3y ago
  That doesn't make money. Have the most popular search engine so they can sell more ads is more like it.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Also so they can basically shape web standards and ecosystems however they want. Websites will do literally anything to stay listed and relevant in google search. Google does this by shaping a web that serves ads and thereby makes them more money
  - mavhc 3y ago
    Right, being able to sell the most ads because you have the most page views about something people are specifically interested in
- tantalor 3y ago
  Search is the moat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat

dspillett 3y ago

Also, when it asks you if you want to turn it on and you say “hell, no”, it will turn on a couple of other settings while it is turning that one off. Make sure you go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy and review and re-disable those. Or switch browser, which I have done on my personal machines.

93po 3y ago
Changing settings is useless. They will at some point “reengineer” settings with auto opt in and revert your decisions Just get Firefox

honeybadger1 3y ago

The article is gaslighting it's readers

fdfdfdf55 3y ago

At the same time, I notice that since recently, youtube with ublock and firefox is pretty much unusable. Time for anti trust to step in.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Firefox is better. I had no issues switching recently.

_8j50 3y ago

Is there a legal or data privacy angle here in enterprise environments where Chrome can be banned due to their sharing of private/internal browsing history with third parties?

ericpauley 3y ago

The most important point to make here (and one missing from the article) is that Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While one may argue browsers should have neither, enabling topics is not reducing user privacy if TPC is already enabled.

MrDirkGently 3y ago

If I'm using Chrome only to test how websites render in it, what are the alternatives? Use another Chromium based browser or do they have the same issues as Chrome? Use a browser testing suite such as BrowserStack? Or will using a user-agent switcher in Firefox achieve the same effect as using Chrome?

NayamAmarshe 3y ago
I use Brave, it's great for web development.
maccard 3y ago
Use chrome for that, but Firefox for everything else.
sp332 3y ago
Put a "best viewed in Safari" badge on it and stop testing in Chrome. If you want to know how an average user will see your site, you should probably be testing with a default profile, with no adblocker. You could leave the browser signed out of your Google account, or have a separate one just for this.

tannhaeuser 3y ago

Ars' (and lobste.rs') take on this [1] is titled "Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome" - with Google cookies and ads on the page ofc. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

jameshush 3y ago

We have a few options for monetizing on the web: 1. Sell stuff (e-commerce, subscriptions, services). 2. Sell ads (every website that's free except Wikipedia). 3. Ask for donations (Wikipedia). I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die. To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website). We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads Not really. You just need to look at any normal billboard; advertisers bought that billboard, even though it knows nothing about demographics or "attribution". Tracking just makes advertising more cost-effective. To the advertiser, not to me. I'm not an advertiser; I gain nothing from the cheapness of advertising. It makes no difference to me whether an ad is targeted or not; I don't want to see it. Especially if it writhes and wriggles distractingly, or autoplays video.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  billboard ads are a drop of the bucket compared to everything.
hnben 3y ago
I think I agree with you, but I would add another option: buy subscription services. These services have a strong incentive to keep their userbase happy. > If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die. beautiful
3y ago

Havoc 3y ago

> Chrome will track user data for the benefit of advertisers. The entitlement mentality towards user behavioural data is wild

pulpfictional 3y ago
Why?

pjmlp 3y ago

Enjoy your Electron based apps, folks.

sh4rks 3y ago

Unrelated, but the other day, I searched something on DDGo on Firefox mobile in private mode, and a few hours later, I see a targeted ad related to that search. Whats the deal with that? The only extension I have installed is Ublock mobile.

hskdhdkshs 3y ago
that's the usual targeting we know and love since early 2000s. we are talking about something worse.
asgerhb 3y ago
If you can reliably recreate this, then you may be on to something interesting. I couldn't guess what. Otherwise, the most likely answer is coincidence.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
IP address? Or coincidence?
lyvxh 3y ago
Well, it might be a coincidence, but it also wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't. Your identity was probably linked using fingerprinting. Private browsing mode offers almost zero protection against this. Even Tor isn't protected unless you enable the Safest security level (= completely disable JavaScript). This might even be done through multiple levels of indirection (mobile browser fingerprint -> Google account -> desktop browser fingerprint).

dewdwedee 3y ago

[flagged]

Phemist 3y ago

So, I've heard it said in another topic on `Topics` that a single list of topics, as far as it is an identifier for a specific person, is far less accurate than a tracking cookie (or similar technology). Well, yes, maybe that is the case _right now_, but these are convenient arguments to push the technology through. There is nothing inherent to the technology that would prevent the `Topics` from being split such that 8 billion (current world population) unique combinations of topics exist. If all topics are completely orthogonal to others, such that the existence of one topic for some user does not give extra information of another topic existing for the same user, we would expect a list of log2(8 billion) ~= 33 topics to suffice as a unique identifier for each individual user, _reported by the browser to every single website that is visited_. So... obviously there is no technological limitation to this list of topics, it is completely feasible to design a list of 33 (or a little bit more) topics in this way.. so what will keep Google from not introducing more topics (as time goes on and people become accustomed to this feature)? My point, in the limit, potentially a few years from now, this feature will be "pareto-dominant" of tracking cookies, or rather in all aspects better at tracking users than tracking cookies ever were.

lifeinthevoid 3y ago
yeah and it's far more convenient to delete cookies than to delete your whole browsing history.

umrashrf 3y ago

moving away from google chrome as we speak

tannhaeuser 3y ago

High time to require unbundling of Chrome on Android, like was done with IE on Windows back then. In EU, that is.

scarface_74 3y ago
And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers. No PC operating system that I know of aside from ChromeOS bundles Chrome, yet people still download it and it’s still dominant. What makes you think the outcome would be different if given a choice? Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser. And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  > And that had absolutely zero effect on the market share of the browsers. Did it not help FF to gain initial market share? > Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser. No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway (and in fact as the first thing after initial setup), and the reason is the incredible bloatedness and lack of scope of browsers. > And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google. This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen (payment, school, administration, health care, and so on); no idea what that has to with using Android or other Google products.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    > Did it not help FF to gain initial market share? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windows-browser-ballot-comes-to-an-end-as-ec-obligation-expires/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo... While there were early signs that the browser ballot screen was influencing browser usage in the EU, with Mozilla attributing some European Firefox growth to the selection page, long-term trends strongly suggest that it was next to useless. In spite of equally prominent placement on the selection screen, Opera's share even within Europe appears to have declined over the last five years. So too have Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chrome, however, has experienced significant growth. > No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway I can’t speak to Android. But iOS updates (which include Safari updates) don’t happen that often and at least users have a usable browser at initial launch on both iOS and Android. You can choose when to update > This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen I don’t know, maybe because the original submission is about Chrome’s privacy issues, not about the “open web”?

jklinger410 3y ago

HN in shambles

sergiotapia 3y ago

Does this affect Brave or will they also stripe out this nonsense?

_chu1 3y ago

There are people in the comments saying Firefox is super slow compared to Chrome but modern computers are genuinely so fast I can't notice a difference. At least on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad T61 I use regularly I have to do some comparisons on what the best browser choice is but on my main PC with a Ryzen 5 7600 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM it hasn't even really occurred that one is faster than the other. I use LibreWolf.

93po 3y ago
I can comment that FF feels slower on iOS but it makes so little difference these days. We’re talking small fractions of a second.
- bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
  Don't all browsers on iOS have to use Safari for rendering?
  - 93po 3y ago
    I believe you're correct but and maybe it's placebo but there is some process of loading and viewing a web page that feels faster in safari. maybe safari does some sort of pre-fetching? i barely use it so even my anecdotal sample size is not large
    - bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
      In fairness, there's an arbitrary amount of "chrome" on top of Safari, so Firefox could very well be slower. There's also this new profile effect where switching browsers always seems faster. The reasoning is that you're comparing browser A, which is loaded down with all your history, cookies, etc. against browser B, which has a clean slate.

lifeinthevoid 3y ago

I've read an interesting comment on lobste.rs that this is basically a way to try to circumvent GDPR.

oehpr 3y ago

... does this article seem a little low quality to anyone else? > By far the most private browsers are specialist non-tracking browsers that prioritise no tracking, such as DuckDuckGo... wha??? > Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. Wha?! The technology google is deploying wouldn't even support that. Frankly the level of personal invasion required to achieve this... Was this just like a bit of biting sarcasm or something? Dry wit that flew over my head? This article seems off.

sp332 3y ago
The comment about DuckDuckGo seems fine?
- oehpr 3y ago
  ... wuh? OH THEY MADE AN ANDROID BROWSER. ok. In my defense I did consider "DuckDuckGo made a browser"? and googled it before I posted this comment, but I did not find any results. Your comment made me dig deeper to find the Android one. I still think that sentence is a bit stilted though, it's got some department of redundancy department vibes. But I yield the point on that one.

ChicagoDave 3y ago

I stopped using Chrome two years ago. I deleted the Facebook app. I have blockers on my desktop and iPhone. I’m aware everyone’s PI info is already compromised, but I’m not adding fuel. There are excellent alternatives to Chrome. I encourage everyone to adopt one.

sp332 3y ago
What are you using for iPhone?
- starbugs 3y ago
  Brave

i_love_cookies 3y ago

[dead]

ulfw 3y ago

People who use an ad company's browser cannot be helped and shouldn't complain.

standardUser 3y ago

Can I just tell Google what I like and then they serve me ads for those things only? Because the current scheme seems like a whole lot of unnecessary subterfuge just to reliably serve me ads I will never click on. Wouldn't they rather have a shot in hell of serving me an ad I might actually click, while also not turning themselves into the poster boys for online privacy violations?

l72 3y ago

If the topics API is really just returning a list of things the user is interested in, like: 2: 'Arts & Entertainment/Acting & Theater', 3: 'Arts & Entertainment/Comics', ... 132: 'Computers & Electronics/Consumer Electronics/Home Theater Systems', ... 208: 'Home & Garden/Gardening', ... why not just have a simple survey and let the user pick or rate what they are interested in? Why the need to have the web browser actually track everything?

l72 3y ago
Also, there should be a permission API around this for each website (like camera/microphone), that explicitly states why the website is requesting this information and what information the browser will return to the website.

bradgessler 3y ago

What’s crazy to me is how many people in the forum continue to run Chrome. There’s barely any mention of switching off Chrome in this thread until scrolling down towards the bottom of the comments. Why is that? It’s so obvious how this story is doing to end—Google will do everything in their power to shove ads down Chrome users throats no matter how many ad blockers people try to run. What is it about Chrome that makes it so much better than alternatives like Firefox, Safari, or any Blink engine variants that aren’t spyware?

kimown 3y ago

Q: Why google search use scroll instead of pagination? A: Sell more ads to users.