Comment by charcircuit
3 years ago
>in reality it does the opposite.
Third party cookies can do everything the topics API can do and more. Third party cookies lets sites collect granular data about what exact site you on and any data they want from it. This API just gives them some topics which may even be a random chosen one and not a real one.
Precisely. The article (and seemingly everyone else) fails to realize that topics is reducible to TPC. If you have TPC then topics provides no additional tracking capability.
Topics is a mess (see a great analysis from a colleague of mine[1]), but it’s a hard sell to call this current step nefarious.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03825
Can you give me a source that enabling the topics API disables third-party cookies? And once Chrome has phased out third-party cookies the topics API will strictly decrease my privacy, not increase it.
>Can you give me a source that enabling the topics API disables third-party cookies?
I never claimed that. The current estimated timeline for phasing out 3rd party cookies as of last month is:
23Q4 Opt in testing for sites
24Q1 1% disabled
24Q2 fully disabled
https://privacysandbox.com/open-web/
> And once Chrome has phased out third-party cookies the topics API will strictly decrease my privacy, not increase it.
You are free to disable topics, sites, or even the entire system altogether. While it does decrease your privacy in return you can get more relevant ads. With 3rd party cookies if you disable them all you will break things even if those things are unrelated to ads.
Then bringing up third party cookies seems like a red herring. They're worse, but for example I have a pi-hole at home. This prompt will probably mislead my wife into accepting it as an improvement, while it will presumably undermine the tracking mitigations I've set up for her until I go fix it.
This is unambiguously a privacy downgrade, regardless of what third party cookies may also be able to do.
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