From the horse's mouth, "privacy sandbox" is explicitly designed "to build thriving digital businesses."
https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/
At face value they claim it's designed to eliminate tracking techniques like fingerprinting, it's actually a system explicitly designed to collect the users' private information. From the horse's mouth.
"To provide this free resource without relying on intrusive tracking, publishers and developers need privacy-preserving alternatives for their key business needs, including serving relevant content and ads."
The proposals involve reducing UA data, ip tracking, etc.
But still allows for some amount of targeting. From my understanding instead of you being an identifiable individual via fingerprinting, the aim is to make you "probably one in [large group] of technology people".
I'm not saying I think it's a good thing, but on the surface it does appear _better_.
I don't understand why we need to trade here. Just block figerprinting and do not provide any alternatives for advertisers. This is the best for users.
The idea is that if sites that query fonts, engage canvas, read the user agent information, etc, they are likely trying to build a fingerprint, so the browser will start to return generic data.
Presumably - hopefully - it would allow users to set their own privacy budgets. Even better if it supports granular per-site control, which may be needed for certain specialized websites.
Many of those features are not so useful and their main use is fingerprinting, for example:
- WebGL is mostly used for fingerprinting
- enumerating installed fonts is mostly used for fingerprinting
They should be put behind a permission popup, so that only those sites that really need them (e.g. graphic editors, text editors) can use them. So nothing gets broken.
There’s absolutely no way a browser should be tracking the topics a user is interested in and then providing them to any script that asks
You can opt out but how many people will actually know they can
The Topics APi is what you get when an Ad company owns the most popular browser
It isn't so much a privacy sandbox, it's an anti competition sandbox.
Google is designing standards and practices under the auspices of user privacy but in reality these changes simply lock others out of accessing data while serving it up to Google.
* Not only are they locking out competition, but they're preventing the user from stopping or mitigating collection of data as well.
On one hand it’s better than what’s going on now, on the other hand it’s not going to give you privacy and it’s likely going to further Google’s advertisement monopoly on much of the internet. Which is where a lot of the debate can be had, but as a user, do you really want any company to track you? If not, then you most likely don’t want control of who gets to track you in the hands of the biggest advertisement company on earth.
The intention of the Topics API is to enable high level interests of web users to be shared with third parties in a privacy-preserving way in order to enable targeted advertising, while also protecting users from unwanted tracking and profiling. The TAG's initial view is that this API does not achieve these goals as specified.
The Topics API as proposed puts the browser in a position of sharing information about the user, derived from their browsing history, with any site that can call the API. This is done in such a way that the user has no fine-grained control over what is revealed, and in what context, or to which parties. It also seems likely that a user would struggle to understand what is even happening; data is gathered and sent behind the scenes, quite opaquely. This goes against the principle of enhancing the user's control, and we believe is not appropriate behaviour for any software purporting to be an agent of a web user.
The responses to the proposal from Webkit and Mozilla highlight the tradeoffs between serving a diverse global population, and adequately protecting the identities of individuals in a given population. Shortcomings on neither side of these tradeoffs are acceptable for web platform technologies.
It's also clear from the positions shared by Mozilla and Webkit that there is a lack of multi-stakeholder support. We remain concerned about fragmentation of the user experience if the Topics API is implemented in a limited number of browsers, and sites that wish to use it prevent access to users of browsers without it (a different scenario from the user having disabled it in settings).
We are particularly concerned by the opportunities for sites to use additional data gathered over time by the Topics API in conjunction with other data gathered about a site visitor, either via other APIs, via out of band means, and/or via existing tracking technologies in place at the same time, such as fingerprinting.
We appreciate the in-depth privacy analyses of the API that have been done so far by Google and by Mozilla. If work on this API is to proceed, it would benefit from further analysis by one or more independant (non-browser engine or adtech) parties.
Further, if the API were both effective and privacy-preserving, it could nonetheless be used to customise content in a discriminatory manner, using stereotypes, inferences or assumptions based on the topics revealed (eg. a topic could be used - accurately or not - to infer a protected characteristic, which is thereby used in selecting an advert to show). Relatedly, there is no binary assessment that can be made over whether a topic is "sensitive" or not. This can vary depending on context, the circumstances of the person it relates to, as well as change over time for the same person.
Giving the web user access to browser settings to configure which topics can be observed and sent, and from/to which parties, would be a necessary addition to an API such as this, and go some way towards restoring agency of the user, but is by no means sufficient. People can become vulnerable in ways they do not expect, and without notice. People cannot be expected to have a full understanding of every possible topic in the taxonomy as it relates to their personal circumstances, nor of the immediate or knock-on effects of sharing this data with sites and advertisers, and nor can they be expected to continually revise their browser settings as their personal or global circumstances change.
A portion of topics returned by the API are proposed to be randomised, in part to enable plausible deniability of the results. The usefulness of this mitigation may be limited in practice; an individual who wants to explain away an inappropriate ad served on a shared computer cannot be expected to understand the low level workings of a specific browser API in a contentious, dangerous or embarrassing situation (assuming a general cultural awareness of the idea of targeted ads being served based on your online activities or even being "listened to" by your devices, which does not exist everywhere, but is certainly pervasive in some places/communities).
While we appreciate the efforts that have gone into this proposal aiming to iteratively improve the privacy-preserving possibilities of targeted advertising, ultimately it falls short. In summary, the proposed API appears to maintain the status quo of inappropriate surveillence on the web, and we do not want to see it proceed further.
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726#issuecom...
From reading that GitHub thread further, the comment you're quoting seems to be an "initial review" only.
Further down the thread are various people (Google, etc) downplaying it, and trying to get around it. Not unsuccessfully.
A browser that truly protected people's privacy would definitionally not meet the needs of advertisers, because those needs are in direct opposition to people's need for privacy.
Hard disagree. A browser is supposed to be my user agent. It is supposed to work for me. It should not be engaging in compromises to my wishes in order to benefit others.
> Chrome should try and improve the ecosystem.
I think that there is much disagreement about what "improving the ecosystem" would look like.
Sure, but enabling sites to be financially viable to run is almost universally considered good. If something is not viable on the web either it will be built on another ecosystem or it won't be built at all. It ends up making the web a worse place to be and strengthens the competitors to the web.
If collectively we decide that intrusive advertising has to go and we need to more directly pay for labour online, then so be it. It doesn't necessarily have to stay the old way forever.
That isn't what's on the table, though. This impacts the ability to target ads. Targeted ads are absolutely not required for a website to be financially viable.
> If something is not viable on the web either it will be built on another ecosystem or it won't be built at all.
The history of the web demonstrates that this isn't true. There's an excluded middle there.
> It ends up making the web a worse place to be and strengthens the competitors to the web.
What are the competitors to the web?
But aside from that, in my opinion, advertising has made the web a much worse place as it is. Advertising has made the web more like interactive cable TV, and limits the variety of activities because only the ones advertisers approve of are effectively allowed.
There is a subset of sites where it is required. Or at least it is with how much resources they are investing into the site and free services they offer.
>What are the competitors to the web?
The biggest competitors are Google's Play store and Apple's App store.
>Advertising has made the web more like interactive cable TV, and limits the variety of activities because only the ones advertisers approve of are effectively allowed.
The existence of sites with advertising doesn't mean that sites without advertising can't exist.
I will never use a browser that serves anyone's desires over mine. That's absurd.
In any case, why in the world would I want to use a browser that is working against my interests and in favor of the interests of an industry that has done nothing but been abusive for a very long time?
I think this would be the best thing that could possibly happen for the health of the web, tbh. Imagine Google search results if every blogspam page plastered with ads no longer had a financial incentive to exist.
EDIT: It would kill some useful sites too, undoubtedly, but I think it would be worth the cost.
Referral links are a terrible business, with even less money and at the same mercy of the oligarch next door.
Intrusive ads disappearing would be transformative and good for the web for a good long while.
If those ads are targeted, then they're not giving it away for free at all. They're just demanding a different currency.
My "browser" runs on my computer, by me, for me. It is not beholden to "all of the stakeholders", or "the rest of the people in the ecosystem". If my agent acting in a manner that User Agents were originally intended to, only fetching the URLs that I - the user - want it to fetch, "would cause a disaster to the health of the web ecosystem", then maybe the current web ecosystem is bad and deserves to meet with disaster.
The web managed to explode in usefulness and popularity before surveillance capitalism became a thing, not because of it.
Are you meaning something different from the current state of affairs?
Because, that seems to describe things currently.
That's complete bullshit.
If it’s so great it would be any easy opt-in for users. But it’s not.