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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> Honest question, why is the privacy sandbox user hostile?

From the horse's mouth, "privacy sandbox" is explicitly designed "to build thriving digital businesses."

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."

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That’s literally written by a PR team, see the quote I pasted from the w3c decision.

So, it's tracking just not intrusive tracking?

It sounds like it's plain old tracking, but pushed and owned by Google through it's control over Chrome.

No it's objectively less intrusive.

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_.

Does Privacy sandbox prevent fingerprinting completely (for example, canvas fingerprinting, WebGL fingerprinting, audio fingerprinting)? Or the advertisers would be able to use both fingerprinting and newly provided data?

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.

We "need to trade here" because Google is an adtech business

"Just block fingerprinting" is also not trivial to do while providing a good user experience.

Put WebGL, enumerating installed fonts, web audio, etc. behind a permission. In rare cases when they are really needed not for fingerprinting, the user will grant a permission and nothing gets broken.

Have you been around for the past 10-15 years of Android? Manual permissions don't solve the problem. People will just say why yes, I do indeed want to read this clickbait article/use this flashlight app, go ahead and give the server my GPS location so it can follow me around. The only reason you don't get much of this anymore is the limits the app stores enforce these days.

You can't block fingerprinting completely without breaking a ton of useful features. But the sandbox has a concept called the privacy budget which tries to determine if a site is collecting too much information. It should allow sites that actually use some of these features to continue to work.

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.

https://github.com/mikewest/privacy-budget

> You can't block fingerprinting completely without breaking a ton of useful features.

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.

To a certain extent yes but…

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

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