Comment by chrismorgan

Although the source article here is clearly opinionated in one direction, I’m not impressed with your claims about actual problems in it. (For reference, I agree with the direction it takes and would make only minor adjustments to it if I were writing it—the only of any substance would be not calling the Privacy Sandbox an “ad platform” just because in a way it’s a little more like a shop that sells picks to ad platforms.)

> 1. Privacy Sandbox is a project, consisting of many proposals. To pitch it as some cohesive product is misleading.

Look, that’s how Google are branding it. It’s an initiative which has turned into a cohesive brand. Just look at how https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-for-the-web-... speaks of it all. That’s pretty much how it’s being presented in the browser, too.

> 2. Related: FLoC and Topics are completely separate things, aside from existing under the same project.

They’re about as completely separate as Chrome 17 and Chrome 117, or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. OK, these are both very imperfect comparisons, but although FLoC and Topics work in somewhat different ways, Topics is for all practical purposes just a fork that continues FLoC. They even treated it that way in the browser (at the time at least, no idea if it’s still so). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts#... seems overall a fair enough portrayal. They simply rebranded the basic concept.

> 3. Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While the proposal has issues and doesn’t resist tracking as well as Google claims (see below article), Ars’ implication that this is somehow making Chrome less privacy-preserving is patently false.

The first and last claims here are obvious nonsense. Third-party cookies only let you track stuff where your code runs, whereas the Topics API uses the entire browser history, so it’s not reducible to third-party cookies unless you mean something very different from me by that word. Ars’ implication is by no means patently false; as far as the current status is concerned, where they’ve added this and not removed third-party cookies, it’s patently true. In the longer term, it’s less clear, better in some ways and worse in others, but “patently false” is still an unreasonable characterisation.