5 ms·

Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefox/Safari)

97 points by kreyenborgi 2y ago

brokensegue 2y ago
Are there extensions that disable this?
- SquareWheel 2y ago
  Do you mean in Chrome? You can disable it from the settings. There should have been a prompt to review the features' settings when it was first introduced.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > There should have been a prompt to review the features' settings when it was first introduced. Although it was phrased disingenuously as a pro-privacy switch that you should obviously turn on.
red_admiral 2y ago
Is there any way I can find where this topic information is stored? I presume it's a SQLite database in the profile folder, like the cookies and history.
- skybrian 2y ago
  I don’t know about on disk, but you can look at it in Setting > Privacy and Security > Ad Privacy > Ad Topics. When I look at mine, Ad Topics always been very generic and boring. “Site-suggested ads” seems more worrisome because some domain names are very specific.
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
Request for positions on the topics API - https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 also mentioned in https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622 The Register article on the topics api last year https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_api_ahead/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_...
etchalon 2y ago
Oh look, an easy new way to fingerprint users.
politelemon 2y ago
> Infer topics of interest from the site URL Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results for most sites?
- mattnewton 2y ago
  I haven't read the spec entirely, but couldn't "infer" mean "check with a compressed list of millions of urls already categorized offline and cached on disk" ?
  - rerdavies 2y ago
    ... using an AI that's been trained on browsing history captured from billions of users. Pretty sure that's what "infer" means.
    - mattnewton 2y ago
      I'm responding to questions on whether or not this could work - "Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results". It could work in the degenerated case of just having a giant dictionary of the top hundred million websites and all their topics, so it stands to reason it could work with "ai" too. Each region's browsing behavior is so "head heavy" I would think you'd rarely need to interpolate to see things that weren't in the "training set" of offline categorized sites.
    - morkalork 2y ago
      Yes, it is a classifier doing drum roll please topic modelling on the content you are looking at. But it runs the model locally so your privacy is totally preserved... right? Not that I consented to my CPU/GPU cycles being used against me in this way though.
pjmlp 2y ago
Yet another step into ChromeOSissification of the Web.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Break up Google fast. We need tech to return to the true hacker spirit.
yndoendo 2y ago
This looks like anti-privacy with extra steps. This breaks the disconnection that iframe provides. Kind of like turning iframe into a detective. Were you interested in tennis on the night of January 3rd?
userbinator 2y ago
The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to... It's clear that mainstream browsers have become the exact opposite of user agents. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution to that problem beyond educating web developers and users, to change course to avoid all this hostile complexity, and possibly creating more alternative browsers that explicitly don't support things like this (or will lie about it to preserve the interests of the user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 )
- pdpi 2y ago
  > The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to... To a certain extent, I expect people to do exactly that as part of an argument in good faith, especially in a technical context. If you can't explain to me how something works, why should I trust your feedback, be it positive or negative?
  - userbinator 2y ago
    I don't care how something works if I'm against the purpose. The same "but we should have a technical argument" BS was used by proponents of WEI, and thankfully most people saw through it. No means no. DO NOT WANT. End of argument.
    - pdpi 2y ago
      I think you misunderstood me. I'm not trying to move the goalposts by suggesting "we should have a technical argument". Discussing whether the feature should even exist is itself a technical discussion. Let's use WEI as an example. You're clear enough in your opinion: you think it shouldn't exist. Why, though? What does it do that you object to? Do you understand how it works well enough to be sure it does the bad thing you think it does? Imagine I'm interested in the discussion, but haven't formed an opinion. I just have Google on one side talking about guaranteeing the integrity of the browser environment somehow, and you saying "DO NOT WANT" on the other. You'll have a much easier time convincing me of your point of view if you can simply show me that you actually understand WEI, and if you can make me understand it too.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
Google's defense is apparently "well it's better than 3rd party cookies" Well we're getting rid of 3rd party cookies... so like, that was the absolute minimum bar. It's a curious list of topics: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v2.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... Does anyone know how the taxonomy was created.
- adv0r 2y ago
  from iab context taxonomy
- treve 2y ago
  I thought the removal of 3rd party cookies was also reversed.
- afavour 2y ago
  Narrator: Google was, in fact, not getting rid of third party cookies
  - luckydata 2y ago
    Note the plan was abandoned to satiate UK regulators, not a decision made unilaterally by Google
    - afavour 2y ago
      No. Let’s be clear: Google absolutely could have continued in removing third party cookies. They’d be doing what Apple and Mozilla already do today, after all. The problem is that Google’s alternatives that still allow tracking by ad providers have run afoul of regulators and Google isn’t prepared to lose that ad revenue.
      - IshKebab 2y ago
        Apple and Mozilla can do it because they don't have as much browser market share as Google, and they don't run their own advertising businesses.
wpm 2y ago
I seriously do not understand why people use Google Chrome and other Chromium derivatives. It's one thing that my non-tech sphere friends do, but I see so many people at work just defaulting to using Google Chrome, and I frankly just cannot fathom it. Like, FFS, is browser sync that useful? In 30+ years using the web on a bunch of different computers, I have not once ever been like "ooooh I wish I had the 35+ tabs I had open on my work computer on my personal one".
- throw-the-towel 2y ago
  Firefox has browsing sync, maybe it's not as seamless as Chrome's, but it's there.
- nsonha 2y ago
  the answer is simple, they don't care that much about privacy, despite claiming so. And for the rest of us devs who actually care, we're just lazy and continue using the work browser for private purposes. Why Chrome as work browser? Because most users use it.
btown 2y ago
This was going to be the compromise that would allow Chrome to have a path towards deprecating third-party cookies without massively decreasing its ad revenue, but they've walked away even from that: https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/ https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/ > 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. We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out... We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586 There are numerous ways that the Topics API could leak sensitive information (say, for instance, increased values for a set of topics statistically related to life events with legal/health consequences) - I'm glad that opposition is being highlighted. Apple's opposition comments are also worth reviewing: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111
- threeseed 2y ago
  If ever there was an antitrust situation it is Google and Chromium. (a) Widespread use of the engine which means its behaviour is what is largely defining the rules of the web today. (b) It is driven by the financial interests of Google, specifically their Ads division. For example: Google recklessly adds every API under the sun even though they know they are being abused for fingerprinting. And they have long lived first party cookies which are used for re-targeting, attribution and conversion tracking. Both of which have major impacts to ad revenue.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    To be clear, it's actually everyone else that benefits from this sort of API. Regulators (eg CMA) are the ones stopping Google from removing third party cookie support from Chrome without a suitable replacement. The world is more complex than what you can see at a glance.
hansvm 2y ago
Hypothetically, what could the modern web look like if instead of inferring user attributes we let users specify those? E.g.; I tend to want recipes by French authors. I have a profile set up in my browser to search in French, prefer French results, and when localization is applicable to retrieve results written in France. Switching to this profile is a button-click and automagically affects what all websites I visit believe out my personna. E.g.; In that same example, even ad-tech presumably benefits from believing my ruse. If I'm in a mood to read French recipes in French, an ad for a US Football game is probably not going to land very well. Perhaps some company could do better by targeting based on both who I am and who I'm purporting to be (especially with respect to important life characteristics like log10(salary) and count(children)), but the temporary personna is by itself likely already better than any inferred characteristics at guiding targeted ads. E.g.; I throw on a DIY personna. Instead of being inundated with (mostly fake) repair services when I ask for bike or device repair information, I find links to solid content like Sheldon Brown's blog and commercial links to informational content, DIY-focused parts and tools for sale, .... The web can still be a for-profit, sanitized entity while providing a vastly better experience for me the searcher and also the poor sucker paying for "bike repair shop" ads on my searches which could never possibly convert for that concept.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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97 points by kreyenborgi 2y ago

brokensegue 2y ago

Are there extensions that disable this?

SquareWheel 2y ago
Do you mean in Chrome? You can disable it from the settings. There should have been a prompt to review the features' settings when it was first introduced.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > There should have been a prompt to review the features' settings when it was first introduced. Although it was phrased disingenuously as a pro-privacy switch that you should obviously turn on.

red_admiral 2y ago

Is there any way I can find where this topic information is stored? I presume it's a SQLite database in the profile folder, like the cookies and history.

skybrian 2y ago
I don’t know about on disk, but you can look at it in Setting > Privacy and Security > Ad Privacy > Ad Topics. When I look at mine, Ad Topics always been very generic and boring. “Site-suggested ads” seems more worrisome because some domain names are very specific.

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

Request for positions on the topics API - https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 also mentioned in https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622 The Register article on the topics api last year https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_api_ahead/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_...

etchalon 2y ago

Oh look, an easy new way to fingerprint users.

politelemon 2y ago

> Infer topics of interest from the site URL Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results for most sites?

mattnewton 2y ago
I haven't read the spec entirely, but couldn't "infer" mean "check with a compressed list of millions of urls already categorized offline and cached on disk" ?
- rerdavies 2y ago
  ... using an AI that's been trained on browsing history captured from billions of users. Pretty sure that's what "infer" means.
  - mattnewton 2y ago
    I'm responding to questions on whether or not this could work - "Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results". It could work in the degenerated case of just having a giant dictionary of the top hundred million websites and all their topics, so it stands to reason it could work with "ai" too. Each region's browsing behavior is so "head heavy" I would think you'd rarely need to interpolate to see things that weren't in the "training set" of offline categorized sites.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    Yes, it is a classifier doing drum roll please topic modelling on the content you are looking at. But it runs the model locally so your privacy is totally preserved... right? Not that I consented to my CPU/GPU cycles being used against me in this way though.

pjmlp 2y ago

Yet another step into ChromeOSissification of the Web.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Break up Google fast. We need tech to return to the true hacker spirit.

yndoendo 2y ago

This looks like anti-privacy with extra steps. This breaks the disconnection that iframe provides. Kind of like turning iframe into a detective. Were you interested in tennis on the night of January 3rd?

userbinator 2y ago

The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to... It's clear that mainstream browsers have become the exact opposite of user agents. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution to that problem beyond educating web developers and users, to change course to avoid all this hostile complexity, and possibly creating more alternative browsers that explicitly don't support things like this (or will lie about it to preserve the interests of the user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 )

pdpi 2y ago
> The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to... To a certain extent, I expect people to do exactly that as part of an argument in good faith, especially in a technical context. If you can't explain to me how something works, why should I trust your feedback, be it positive or negative?
- userbinator 2y ago
  I don't care how something works if I'm against the purpose. The same "but we should have a technical argument" BS was used by proponents of WEI, and thankfully most people saw through it. No means no. DO NOT WANT. End of argument.
  - pdpi 2y ago
    I think you misunderstood me. I'm not trying to move the goalposts by suggesting "we should have a technical argument". Discussing whether the feature should even exist is itself a technical discussion. Let's use WEI as an example. You're clear enough in your opinion: you think it shouldn't exist. Why, though? What does it do that you object to? Do you understand how it works well enough to be sure it does the bad thing you think it does? Imagine I'm interested in the discussion, but haven't formed an opinion. I just have Google on one side talking about guaranteeing the integrity of the browser environment somehow, and you saying "DO NOT WANT" on the other. You'll have a much easier time convincing me of your point of view if you can simply show me that you actually understand WEI, and if you can make me understand it too.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

Google's defense is apparently "well it's better than 3rd party cookies" Well we're getting rid of 3rd party cookies... so like, that was the absolute minimum bar. It's a curious list of topics: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v2.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... Does anyone know how the taxonomy was created.

adv0r 2y ago
from iab context taxonomy
treve 2y ago
I thought the removal of 3rd party cookies was also reversed.
afavour 2y ago
Narrator: Google was, in fact, not getting rid of third party cookies
- luckydata 2y ago
  Note the plan was abandoned to satiate UK regulators, not a decision made unilaterally by Google
  - afavour 2y ago
    No. Let’s be clear: Google absolutely could have continued in removing third party cookies. They’d be doing what Apple and Mozilla already do today, after all. The problem is that Google’s alternatives that still allow tracking by ad providers have run afoul of regulators and Google isn’t prepared to lose that ad revenue.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Apple and Mozilla can do it because they don't have as much browser market share as Google, and they don't run their own advertising businesses.

wpm 2y ago

I seriously do not understand why people use Google Chrome and other Chromium derivatives. It's one thing that my non-tech sphere friends do, but I see so many people at work just defaulting to using Google Chrome, and I frankly just cannot fathom it. Like, FFS, is browser sync that useful? In 30+ years using the web on a bunch of different computers, I have not once ever been like "ooooh I wish I had the 35+ tabs I had open on my work computer on my personal one".

throw-the-towel 2y ago
Firefox has browsing sync, maybe it's not as seamless as Chrome's, but it's there.
nsonha 2y ago
the answer is simple, they don't care that much about privacy, despite claiming so. And for the rest of us devs who actually care, we're just lazy and continue using the work browser for private purposes. Why Chrome as work browser? Because most users use it.

btown 2y ago

This was going to be the compromise that would allow Chrome to have a path towards deprecating third-party cookies without massively decreasing its ad revenue, but they've walked away even from that: https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/ https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/ > 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. We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out... We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586 There are numerous ways that the Topics API could leak sensitive information (say, for instance, increased values for a set of topics statistically related to life events with legal/health consequences) - I'm glad that opposition is being highlighted. Apple's opposition comments are also worth reviewing: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111

threeseed 2y ago
If ever there was an antitrust situation it is Google and Chromium. (a) Widespread use of the engine which means its behaviour is what is largely defining the rules of the web today. (b) It is driven by the financial interests of Google, specifically their Ads division. For example: Google recklessly adds every API under the sun even though they know they are being abused for fingerprinting. And they have long lived first party cookies which are used for re-targeting, attribution and conversion tracking. Both of which have major impacts to ad revenue.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  To be clear, it's actually everyone else that benefits from this sort of API. Regulators (eg CMA) are the ones stopping Google from removing third party cookie support from Chrome without a suitable replacement. The world is more complex than what you can see at a glance.

hansvm 2y ago

Hypothetically, what could the modern web look like if instead of inferring user attributes we let users specify those? E.g.; I tend to want recipes by French authors. I have a profile set up in my browser to search in French, prefer French results, and when localization is applicable to retrieve results written in France. Switching to this profile is a button-click and automagically affects what all websites I visit believe out my personna. E.g.; In that same example, even ad-tech presumably benefits from believing my ruse. If I'm in a mood to read French recipes in French, an ad for a US Football game is probably not going to land very well. Perhaps some company could do better by targeting based on both who I am and who I'm purporting to be (especially with respect to important life characteristics like log10(salary) and count(children)), but the temporary personna is by itself likely already better than any inferred characteristics at guiding targeted ads. E.g.; I throw on a DIY personna. Instead of being inundated with (mostly fake) repair services when I ask for bike or device repair information, I find links to solid content like Sheldon Brown's blog and commercial links to informational content, DIY-focused parts and tools for sale, .... The web can still be a for-profit, sanitized entity while providing a vastly better experience for me the searcher and also the poor sucker paying for "bike repair shop" ads on my searches which could never possibly convert for that concept.

deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago

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