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