Honest question, why is the privacy sandbox user hostile? I assume it's because Google is using it to collect your information but blocking everyone else from collecting it?
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.