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Comment by bugfix | Hacker News Reader

How long until big websites start implementing feature detection to block browsers without this API?

Luckily many websites won’t need to, since I’m sure Cloudflare will offer disabling Google topics as a sign you’re a bot. (I say this after getting stuck on a Cloudflare “are you a bot?” loop that I couldn’t get out of and that prevented me from getting to my site.)

Of course, the actual bots will just enable topics and fill it with random data, and only the privacy conscious will be negatively affected.

That loop is sometimes a DNS issue (like with the archive.is type of sites when you have cloudflare DNS or private relay enabled)

archive.is isn't only broken because of cloudflare, also happens with cloud9

Can't we also enable random data

If only these web sites could get some kind guarantee from the user’s browser that the browser will show ads and the user’s eye balls will see them… some kind of “web integrity” if you will…

How many projects do browser detection and block everything that isn't Chrome? A tiny fraction of websites do that.

It's absolutely a concern, just as sites relying on WEI is a concern. But it seems unlikely that sites will intentionally choose to exclude a non-trivial portion of their visitors.

If you want to make it even less likely, though, this is a great time to switch to Firefox (for its independence, as a browser not based on the Chrome engine at all).

I doubt websites would want to block all Safari users, there's too many given iOS.

people who care about this kind of thing will simply cease to use those websites.

I have never clicked on facebook/instagram links because of their login walls, I have ceased to click on twitter links since they've implemented theirs, I will do the same even with youtube when it inevitably follows the same path.

ultimately, I understand why we don't matter to them, so I don't really mind.

What stops a browser implementing the API but feeding made up information through it?

Nothing.

Until Web Environment Integrity lands too.

(afaik there's no FloC attestation, but I'm not 100% confident about that)

unfortunately, both blocking the API, or faking it, will be abused to track users, unless a significant number of users do it in the same way...

Because a tracker could detect that your topic of interest are fake? How would they know?

If they're relatively unique they can just track you across sites and use your browsing history instead.

Simple. If the Topics API is disabled, then you are a nerd who spends too much time on sites like Hacker News, and they can show you ads accordingly.

Depends, but either the topics never changing, or them changing too randomly, could all be detected when combined with other tracking, and become part of your identity as such...

I imagine a browser extension could do that.

Eh. You can already detect ad blockers and the vast majority of sites don’t bother to do so. I’d be surprised if this was much different.

More and more sites are detecting and blocking adblockers. I’ve encountered so many articles on my phone recently that are completely unreadable. I click a link from mastodon or reddit or wherever and all I get is a full page unskipable “disable your Adblock to continue” message. And then I click back, and scroll past. Never getting to read past the headline

I'm surprised how many sites now have "you seem to be using an ad blocker" popups. Many of them still let you see the content after clicking away a nag, but it's only a step away from fully disabling. (uBlock Origin does a good job hiding these so I mostly don't notice it; but with NextDNS as an ad blocker it's a big problem.)

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