5 ms·

A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web

108 points by agwa 2y ago

JohnFen 2y ago
Did I miss something here? It seems like a whole lot of marketing-speak that never gets around to describing what this "new path" consists of.
- skilled 2y ago
  > Google Chrome is no longer ‘deprecating third-party cookies’
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    That counts as a "new path"? My, how low that bar has become.
- robhlt 2y ago
  The new path is they aren't deprecating third-party cookies anymore. Instead they're going to "introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing" (in the 4th paragraph).
  - deskr 2y ago
    It'll be like Android's location sharing with Google. Nothing works unless you agree to a wholesale google location surveillance. Then they can say you agreed to this.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      I disagree. Things may be different in the EU, but for every feature that triggered the "enable location history" popup, it made a lot of sense to require it. And, most importantly, you can just turn it off and everything important keeps working. You can disable the "send a list of nearby cell towers to Google's live database" setting, the "send a list of Bluetooth beacons to Google's live database" setting, and the "send a list of WiFi networks to Google's live database" setting, all without losing location access. Your location access will become a lot slower, but that's just a consequence of having to rely on GPS again, like we did before all of these extra features became available. Google is even making their location history feature worse because they don't like how many blanket location history requests they're receiving from authorities, by moving location history to be stored on-device. For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - JohnFen 2y ago
        > after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune. So we can expect similar shenanigans when it comes to the "privacy sandbox".
        deskr 2y ago
        Only until they're found out.
      - vmfunction 2y ago
        >For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune. And I will never trust google again after that with my person important data! No matter what day do now!
      - hedora 2y ago
        The location API sends your gps position to google so they can annotate it. They claim they don’t record your history, but, at the very least, as a US company, they have to share it with the authorities. If you could truly opt out, then it’d be much easier to use third party software without google play services installed.
      - rjh29 2y ago
        There is so much stuff Chrome sends to Google though. I was curious how their autofill implementation works and... there is code to send a list of all form and field names to a Google API. That alone could be sensitive information.
  - zorrn 2y ago
    Sad. I really hoped that Google would deprecate those for a little bit more private web.
  - threecheese 2y ago
    I’m sorry, what?!? We had a massive web presence overhaul at $bigco, high-vis project, it just completed. All because third party cookies were going to become unsupported. Under time and under budget, what a waste of good velocity.
    - imp0cat 2y ago
      You're not alone.
    - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
      Did the overhaul result in better end user privacy? If so it was worth it. Even if it just resulted in a higher cost to maintain the existing level of privacy violation it would be worth it from a customers perspective. The more it costs to surveil people the better from the consumer privacy perspective.
- legitster 2y ago
  It sounds like some sort of browser-based configuration and they don't want to talk about it because lawyers.
fumar 2y ago
They should’ve started with user choice as the first milestone when it was originally announced. Similar to Apple’s app tracking. Or just get rid of cookies and let ad tech be less invasive.
- agwa 2y ago
  > Or just get rid of cookies and let ad tech be less invasive. They tried to get rid of third-party cookies and regulators wouldn't let them do that.
  - InTheArena 2y ago
    primarily because it would put any publisher or site not named Facebook or Google out of business, or have to shift all of their ads to google or facebook. You would have to break up Google in order for them not to have a a insane market advantage if they got rid of 3pc. Google would still have access to all their consumer markets, google analytics, etc, and everyone else would have to do business with google or go out of business.
  - fumar 2y ago
    Why? I get that publishers want ads but cookies are not required for ads. Safari and Firefox have 3P cookie restrictions already.
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      Because Google (the ad provider) gets to do all the tracking without third-party cookies (by asking Google (the web browser) for that information), which the other ad providers can't do.
      - agwa 2y ago
        I'm not aware of any functionality in Chrome that allows Google to get tracking data that other ad providers can't, but it seems like regulators should target that instead of preventing Chrome from banning third-party cookies.
legitster 2y ago
> In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. If this is a more prominent & robust implementation of "Do Not Track" with actual teeth from the browser, I would be fully on board. It probably won't be, but it could.
btown 2y ago
From the OP: > Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. The OP also cites https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/15189422 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/15189422 (also published today) which makes the "why" of this self-evident: > By comparing the treatment arm to control 1 arm, we observed that removing third-party cookies while enabling the Privacy Sandbox APIs led to -20% and -18% programmatic revenue for Google Ad Manager and Google AdSense publishers, respectively. For the mysterious "new experience in Chrome" they mention, I'll be keeping an eye on their public planning repositories, but there's no guarantee that the project they're mentioning is related to any of these: https://github.com/orgs/explainers-by-googlers/repositories?type=all https://github.com/orgs/explainers-by-googlers/repositories?... https://github.com/orgs/privacycg/repositories?type=all https://github.com/orgs/privacycg/repositories?type=all https://github.com/privacysandbox/privacy-sandbox-dev-support/issues https://github.com/privacysandbox/privacy-sandbox-dev-suppor...
- righthand 2y ago
  > new experience in Chrome An unnamed experience to replace a bad policy seems like the kind of thing you state when a project has failed and is winding down. I agree that Google needs an eye kept on them though. They are never to be trusted.
  - DougN7 2y ago
    It’s sad that “don’t be evil” is now a joke.
    - righthand 2y ago
      Or maybe it was always a joke that people took seriously? What about Dont Be Evil was guaranteed to render different results than Microsoft besides passionate speeches? The motto should have been “Complexity Shift Evil” or “Evil Differently”.
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
victor- 2y ago
A major problem with blocking third party cookies is that it kills any embeddable logged in experience. Think payment gateway widgets that would now require you to login every time you want to make a purchase, or youtube embeds that would no longer recognize your premium subscription and roll ads across the web if if you pay for none, etc.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  That's what browsers are working on Federated Credential Management APIs for: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API
  - charrondev 2y ago
    It would have been nice to have a replacement for it ready and shipped before they started getting removed.
    - Vinnl 2y ago
      They haven't gotten removed yet, just compartmentalised and some important existing ones grandfathered in, I believe. And none of that has happened in Chrome, as far as I know.
- grishka 2y ago
  And that's the only good use case for third-party cookies. I'm willing to sacrifice that if it would mean that reliable cross-site tracking is made impossible.
freitasm 2y ago
> "Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time." Do we believe an average Internet user has any knowledge to make an "informed decision"?
svat 2y ago
> Throughout this process, we’ve received feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders, including regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), publishers, web developers and standards groups, civil society, and participants in the advertising industry. Chrome (and Google in general) has a tough problem of having to satisfy such diametrically opposed "stakeholders" -- being stuck in the middle and having to satisfy both "civil society" and "the advertising industry" means it won't do a great job at either, no matter what.
- troyvit 2y ago
  If I was under pressure from so many different stakeholders with different requirements I'd probably ask to be broken up.
- InTheArena 2y ago
  The challenge is more satisfying anti-trust and privacy. Anti-trust requires transparency to validate that no one is abusing the system, privacy requires opaqueness.
- linuxandrew 2y ago
  Not only that, they are the advertising industry, or at least a major player. Moves like Manifest V3, continuing 3P cookies and user-hostile moves on YouTube are all a part of that. Chrome should really not be a part of Google IMO. It's a significant conflict of interest.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    In spite of Manifest V3 being a shit show, I continue to see all manners of evidence that Google wants genuine honest reform for user privacy. The attitude & negativity is at severely problematic levels, and Google actually gets that improvement & reform is necessary to keep going for another decade without some kind of boil over/explosion. I agree that Chrome in theory shouldnt be a part of Google. But generally I think there is incredibly little self-dealing, that some ideas do go wrong but usually there's not such a sinister backstory of self-interest driving things. I don't know about today, but I'm the past engineers would pretty definitely say they'd never seen anything like the insinuation & top down steering that's so regularly casually implied, and it's remarkable how this casual accusation of rot is left to dominate. It's really unfortunate. But I still think I'm principle there should ideally be harder separation. But I really doubt we can get an adequate funding source lined up. Chrome supports humanity's preeminent multi-media platform, is a huge gift to the world. And that online world that exists because of Chrome and FF, the general health of that world, that's what keeps Google alive & keeps the money pouring in. If Google can't invest in the web who would step up?.I'd love to see hundreds of millions a years allocated to this collective treasure we all enjoy, that runs on almost as many systems as Doom runs on, but alas there's just not the collective motive & will to support our great works. I really hope Chrome can offer users a choice here, and that the choice really is good and that we can opt to leave this terrible 3rd party cookie world behind. I like the idea of not having a hard break, of this being more of a shift, one that the world can be more involved in navigating. Fingers crossed.
Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
> including regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) > as we finalize this approach, we’ll continue to consult with the CMA, ICO and other regulators globally Very interesting that it specifically calls out the little UK regulators rather than the much bigger US or EU bodies.
- chippiewill 2y ago
  The UK regulators can be aggressive and have teeth. The CMA held up Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard by about 4 months. The UK is still one of the world's largest economies so they're hard to ignore. The CMA and ICO tend to be quite collaborative and apolitical so they're easy for companies to work with. Ironically I think the ICO is still one of the best enforcers of EU data privacy laws.
pupppet 2y ago
I've been wearily ignoring the "Third-party cookie will be blocked in future Chrome versions..." notice in the console for months now knowing I'd have to act on it eventually. Hurray for procrastination!
- rjh29 2y ago
  Let's hope their extension V3 proposal dies the same way.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Firefox disallows them by default, and in OP for Chrome we're also only talking about what's the default, from a developer perspective you should still act on it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
healsdata 2y ago
I can't tell from the announcement or official site. Is CHIPS still a thing? Do I still have to partition all my cookies I write on one domain I own to work on another domain I own? https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd/chips https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd/chips
- IX-103 2y ago
  Yes CHIPS is still a thing. As far as I can tell, nothing changes except that Chrome will not disable third party cookies by default. It will remain a preference that users can choose.
moi2388 2y ago
Aaaand of course they use Google cookies. Privacy for thou, not for us.
mindslight 2y ago
Seeing the name "Privacy Sandbox", you might think it would be a ground-up creation aimed at mitigating all of the gratuitous security vulnerabilities that Doubleclick has pushed into the web ecosystem - with deterministic rendering and a fixed lists of system fonts to fix the canvas vulns, permissions checks returning immediate 'no' instead of hanging on asking the user, permissions gating things that can likely never be secured (webgl), and so on with every vulnerability that leads to browser fingerprinting. But no, it's an Orwellian term meant to market something that deliberately violates user trust by leaking even more information!
butz 2y ago
They forgot to update the frontpage.
vehemenz 2y ago
Interesting timing for this. Chrome 127 (releases today) disables Manifest V2 extensions. When uBlock Lite runs out of rules, unwanted advertising will be back on the web. With all due respect to the Chrome team, where is the leadership, competence, or moral courage at Google? It looks like they are announcing to the world today that they care more about advertisers than users.
- ianschmitz 2y ago
  While I agree with you… > It looks like they are announcing to the world today that they care more about advertisers than users. Where does 78% of their revenue come from? I’m not sure why you’re surprised.
rmellow 2y ago
"Privacy Sandbox" by Google. See also: 1. Exxon's "Advanced Recycling" 2. Phillip Morris' "Smoke Free" > The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
llmblockchain 2y ago
So let me get this right... Google introduces a lot of "privacy protecting" ideas like removing third party cookies, moving extensions to manifest v3, etc. Then they backtrack on removing third party cookies and keep the manifest v3 roadmap. Essentially, they are getting their cookies and eating it too.
wheresmyshadow 2y ago
Is it just me or that's just a huge nothing-burger? That "new path" is not even explained in this? It's just a marketing speech.
kkjkj 2y ago
[dead]

108 points by agwa 2y ago

Did I miss something here? It seems like a whole lot of marketing-speak that never gets around to describing what this "new path" consists of.

skilled 2y ago
> Google Chrome is no longer ‘deprecating third-party cookies’
- JohnFen 2y ago
  That counts as a "new path"? My, how low that bar has become.
robhlt 2y ago
The new path is they aren't deprecating third-party cookies anymore. Instead they're going to "introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing" (in the 4th paragraph).
- deskr 2y ago
  It'll be like Android's location sharing with Google. Nothing works unless you agree to a wholesale google location surveillance. Then they can say you agreed to this.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    I disagree. Things may be different in the EU, but for every feature that triggered the "enable location history" popup, it made a lot of sense to require it. And, most importantly, you can just turn it off and everything important keeps working. You can disable the "send a list of nearby cell towers to Google's live database" setting, the "send a list of Bluetooth beacons to Google's live database" setting, and the "send a list of WiFi networks to Google's live database" setting, all without losing location access. Your location access will become a lot slower, but that's just a consequence of having to rely on GPS again, like we did before all of these extra features became available. Google is even making their location history feature worse because they don't like how many blanket location history requests they're receiving from authorities, by moving location history to be stored on-device. For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      > after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune. So we can expect similar shenanigans when it comes to the "privacy sandbox".
      - deskr 2y ago
        Only until they're found out.
    - vmfunction 2y ago
      >For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune. And I will never trust google again after that with my person important data! No matter what day do now!
    - hedora 2y ago
      The location API sends your gps position to google so they can annotate it. They claim they don’t record your history, but, at the very least, as a US company, they have to share it with the authorities. If you could truly opt out, then it’d be much easier to use third party software without google play services installed.
    - rjh29 2y ago
      There is so much stuff Chrome sends to Google though. I was curious how their autofill implementation works and... there is code to send a list of all form and field names to a Google API. That alone could be sensitive information.
- zorrn 2y ago
  Sad. I really hoped that Google would deprecate those for a little bit more private web.
- threecheese 2y ago
  I’m sorry, what?!? We had a massive web presence overhaul at $bigco, high-vis project, it just completed. All because third party cookies were going to become unsupported. Under time and under budget, what a waste of good velocity.
  - imp0cat 2y ago
    You're not alone.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    Did the overhaul result in better end user privacy? If so it was worth it. Even if it just resulted in a higher cost to maintain the existing level of privacy violation it would be worth it from a customers perspective. The more it costs to surveil people the better from the consumer privacy perspective.
legitster 2y ago
It sounds like some sort of browser-based configuration and they don't want to talk about it because lawyers.

fumar 2y ago

They should’ve started with user choice as the first milestone when it was originally announced. Similar to Apple’s app tracking. Or just get rid of cookies and let ad tech be less invasive.

agwa 2y ago
> Or just get rid of cookies and let ad tech be less invasive. They tried to get rid of third-party cookies and regulators wouldn't let them do that.
- InTheArena 2y ago
  primarily because it would put any publisher or site not named Facebook or Google out of business, or have to shift all of their ads to google or facebook. You would have to break up Google in order for them not to have a a insane market advantage if they got rid of 3pc. Google would still have access to all their consumer markets, google analytics, etc, and everyone else would have to do business with google or go out of business.
- fumar 2y ago
  Why? I get that publishers want ads but cookies are not required for ads. Safari and Firefox have 3P cookie restrictions already.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Because Google (the ad provider) gets to do all the tracking without third-party cookies (by asking Google (the web browser) for that information), which the other ad providers can't do.
    - agwa 2y ago
      I'm not aware of any functionality in Chrome that allows Google to get tracking data that other ad providers can't, but it seems like regulators should target that instead of preventing Chrome from banning third-party cookies.

legitster 2y ago

> In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. If this is a more prominent & robust implementation of "Do Not Track" with actual teeth from the browser, I would be fully on board. It probably won't be, but it could.

btown 2y ago

From the OP: > Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. The OP also cites https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/15189422 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/15189422 (also published today) which makes the "why" of this self-evident: > By comparing the treatment arm to control 1 arm, we observed that removing third-party cookies while enabling the Privacy Sandbox APIs led to -20% and -18% programmatic revenue for Google Ad Manager and Google AdSense publishers, respectively. For the mysterious "new experience in Chrome" they mention, I'll be keeping an eye on their public planning repositories, but there's no guarantee that the project they're mentioning is related to any of these: https://github.com/orgs/explainers-by-googlers/repositories?type=all https://github.com/orgs/explainers-by-googlers/repositories?... https://github.com/orgs/privacycg/repositories?type=all https://github.com/orgs/privacycg/repositories?type=all https://github.com/privacysandbox/privacy-sandbox-dev-support/issues https://github.com/privacysandbox/privacy-sandbox-dev-suppor...

righthand 2y ago
> new experience in Chrome An unnamed experience to replace a bad policy seems like the kind of thing you state when a project has failed and is winding down. I agree that Google needs an eye kept on them though. They are never to be trusted.
- DougN7 2y ago
  It’s sad that “don’t be evil” is now a joke.
  - righthand 2y ago
    Or maybe it was always a joke that people took seriously? What about Dont Be Evil was guaranteed to render different results than Microsoft besides passionate speeches? The motto should have been “Complexity Shift Evil” or “Evil Differently”.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago

victor- 2y ago

A major problem with blocking third party cookies is that it kills any embeddable logged in experience. Think payment gateway widgets that would now require you to login every time you want to make a purchase, or youtube embeds that would no longer recognize your premium subscription and roll ads across the web if if you pay for none, etc.

Vinnl 2y ago
That's what browsers are working on Federated Credential Management APIs for: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API
- charrondev 2y ago
  It would have been nice to have a replacement for it ready and shipped before they started getting removed.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    They haven't gotten removed yet, just compartmentalised and some important existing ones grandfathered in, I believe. And none of that has happened in Chrome, as far as I know.
grishka 2y ago
And that's the only good use case for third-party cookies. I'm willing to sacrifice that if it would mean that reliable cross-site tracking is made impossible.

freitasm 2y ago

> "Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time." Do we believe an average Internet user has any knowledge to make an "informed decision"?

svat 2y ago

> Throughout this process, we’ve received feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders, including regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), publishers, web developers and standards groups, civil society, and participants in the advertising industry. Chrome (and Google in general) has a tough problem of having to satisfy such diametrically opposed "stakeholders" -- being stuck in the middle and having to satisfy both "civil society" and "the advertising industry" means it won't do a great job at either, no matter what.

troyvit 2y ago
If I was under pressure from so many different stakeholders with different requirements I'd probably ask to be broken up.
InTheArena 2y ago
The challenge is more satisfying anti-trust and privacy. Anti-trust requires transparency to validate that no one is abusing the system, privacy requires opaqueness.
linuxandrew 2y ago
Not only that, they are the advertising industry, or at least a major player. Moves like Manifest V3, continuing 3P cookies and user-hostile moves on YouTube are all a part of that. Chrome should really not be a part of Google IMO. It's a significant conflict of interest.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  In spite of Manifest V3 being a shit show, I continue to see all manners of evidence that Google wants genuine honest reform for user privacy. The attitude & negativity is at severely problematic levels, and Google actually gets that improvement & reform is necessary to keep going for another decade without some kind of boil over/explosion. I agree that Chrome in theory shouldnt be a part of Google. But generally I think there is incredibly little self-dealing, that some ideas do go wrong but usually there's not such a sinister backstory of self-interest driving things. I don't know about today, but I'm the past engineers would pretty definitely say they'd never seen anything like the insinuation & top down steering that's so regularly casually implied, and it's remarkable how this casual accusation of rot is left to dominate. It's really unfortunate. But I still think I'm principle there should ideally be harder separation. But I really doubt we can get an adequate funding source lined up. Chrome supports humanity's preeminent multi-media platform, is a huge gift to the world. And that online world that exists because of Chrome and FF, the general health of that world, that's what keeps Google alive & keeps the money pouring in. If Google can't invest in the web who would step up?.I'd love to see hundreds of millions a years allocated to this collective treasure we all enjoy, that runs on almost as many systems as Doom runs on, but alas there's just not the collective motive & will to support our great works. I really hope Chrome can offer users a choice here, and that the choice really is good and that we can opt to leave this terrible 3rd party cookie world behind. I like the idea of not having a hard break, of this being more of a shift, one that the world can be more involved in navigating. Fingers crossed.

Doctor_Fegg 2y ago

> including regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) > as we finalize this approach, we’ll continue to consult with the CMA, ICO and other regulators globally Very interesting that it specifically calls out the little UK regulators rather than the much bigger US or EU bodies.

chippiewill 2y ago
The UK regulators can be aggressive and have teeth. The CMA held up Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard by about 4 months. The UK is still one of the world's largest economies so they're hard to ignore. The CMA and ICO tend to be quite collaborative and apolitical so they're easy for companies to work with. Ironically I think the ICO is still one of the best enforcers of EU data privacy laws.

pupppet 2y ago

I've been wearily ignoring the "Third-party cookie will be blocked in future Chrome versions..." notice in the console for months now knowing I'd have to act on it eventually. Hurray for procrastination!

rjh29 2y ago
Let's hope their extension V3 proposal dies the same way.
OJFord 2y ago
Firefox disallows them by default, and in OP for Chrome we're also only talking about what's the default, from a developer perspective you should still act on it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

healsdata 2y ago

I can't tell from the announcement or official site. Is CHIPS still a thing? Do I still have to partition all my cookies I write on one domain I own to work on another domain I own? https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd/chips https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd/chips

IX-103 2y ago
Yes CHIPS is still a thing. As far as I can tell, nothing changes except that Chrome will not disable third party cookies by default. It will remain a preference that users can choose.

moi2388 2y ago

Aaaand of course they use Google cookies. Privacy for thou, not for us.

mindslight 2y ago

Seeing the name "Privacy Sandbox", you might think it would be a ground-up creation aimed at mitigating all of the gratuitous security vulnerabilities that Doubleclick has pushed into the web ecosystem - with deterministic rendering and a fixed lists of system fonts to fix the canvas vulns, permissions checks returning immediate 'no' instead of hanging on asking the user, permissions gating things that can likely never be secured (webgl), and so on with every vulnerability that leads to browser fingerprinting. But no, it's an Orwellian term meant to market something that deliberately violates user trust by leaking even more information!

butz 2y ago

They forgot to update the frontpage.

vehemenz 2y ago

Interesting timing for this. Chrome 127 (releases today) disables Manifest V2 extensions. When uBlock Lite runs out of rules, unwanted advertising will be back on the web. With all due respect to the Chrome team, where is the leadership, competence, or moral courage at Google? It looks like they are announcing to the world today that they care more about advertisers than users.

ianschmitz 2y ago
While I agree with you… > It looks like they are announcing to the world today that they care more about advertisers than users. Where does 78% of their revenue come from? I’m not sure why you’re surprised.

rmellow 2y ago

"Privacy Sandbox" by Google. See also: 1. Exxon's "Advanced Recycling" 2. Phillip Morris' "Smoke Free" > The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

llmblockchain 2y ago

So let me get this right... Google introduces a lot of "privacy protecting" ideas like removing third party cookies, moving extensions to manifest v3, etc. Then they backtrack on removing third party cookies and keep the manifest v3 roadmap. Essentially, they are getting their cookies and eating it too.

wheresmyshadow 2y ago

Is it just me or that's just a huge nothing-burger? That "new path" is not even explained in this? It's just a marketing speech.

kkjkj 2y ago

[dead]