Comment by feoren

3 years ago

Read the actual words that it actually says. Sites can pay Google to get a profile of you, based on your browsing history, sent to them when you visit their website. Who's keeping anything local?

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feoren

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charcircuit  3 years ago

What are you talking about? Your history is saved locally. Websites call document.browsingTopics() to get topics that the user is interested in.

  • feoren  3 years ago

    So if a website, which already has way too many ways to identify you, calls document.browsingTopics() to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills, or knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that? You don't consider that spyware? That's just as bad as my browser having a back button?

    • charcircuit  3 years ago

      >to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills

      Those aren't topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

      >knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that?

      If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Topics also have a chance to be randomly replaced. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these women clothing sites hoping that one of your future website visitors would see your ad.

      >You don't consider that spyware?

      The real thing you should be worried about is third party cookies. They don't have any of these privacy features that topics has and they can collect a lot more data. Both of your examples are possible with third party cookies, but not with topics. Google is trying to phase out 3rd party cookies sometime next year.

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