Google's Cookie Killing Tech Is Now On Almost Every Chrome … – Slashdot

Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter
Nickname:
Password:
Nickname:
Password:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Websites and advertising companies will know there’s a person interested in a certain Topic, but they won’t be able to tell who you are specifically.
Really, because this feels like a new vector to fingerprint users with. Google doesn’t have a great track record with any of the stuff that has overlapped with their ability to sell ads, so I don’t think anyone should give them trust here. Would love to know more.
Also: the settings are opt-out, not opt-in. When you open your updated browser, you get a popup telling you how your privacy is now fantastic, and this can be disabled. No link to just disable it though. Just a “Settings” link where you have to go into settings and disable them all individually.
The screen that tells you about it has two options: “No thanks” and “Yes please”.
You aint lying. Simple challenge. Fire up up a local httpserver and point your chrome browser to your own computer. Now run lsof -i. What? A persistent connection to google owned domains like 1e100.net? Now do it with Firefox, Vivaldi, and Brave, to see the exact same thing. Watch the encrypted dataflows. See how everything you do with every browser is flowing to Google, Azure or Amazon. Ads are irrelevant, because the privacy violations are more deeply embedded.
So what do I do about my phone when Iâ(TM)m not in my house? Not sarcastic, seriously looking for a solution.
I just assume phones are doomed. Half the time the phone company owns my phone anyway, I am just making payments. Intellectual property and work stuff gets developed on computers, and when you can’t protect that from other companies it is an issue.
But the combination of category and the other headers that are sent are more likely to be unique. So if you already have cookie blocking extensions installed, it will decrease your privacy. They did not launch a new ‘privacy feature’. They launched a new advertising feature.
I did get a setting to immediately disable it on the popup at the beginning. Might be different in the EU than the US?

which Google is celebrating by redesigning Chrome to make it look and feel more closely aligned with
Goody goody gumdrops, a UI refresh. Haven’t had one of those for weeks if not months, and just as I was getting used to everything that was broken from the last UI refresh.
Topics is of little use for fingerprinting. One of the reasons FLoC, its predecessor, failed was because people (including me) got involved in the development process and pointed out how it could be used for fingerprinting.
Topics resists fingerprinting by randomising the list of topics presented to the website, and periodically rotating the list. It’s also possible to send a null list, if the browser has not had time to gather topics of interest, or if the user disables the Topics API. How useful that null

Websites and advertising companies will know there’s a person interested in a certain Topic, but they won’t be able to tell who you are specifically.
Really, because this feels like a new vector to fingerprint users with. Google doesn’t have a great track record with any of the stuff that has overlapped with their ability to sell ads, so I don’t think anyone should give them trust here. Would love to know more.
As I understand it (note that I have no non-public information) Topics is specifically designed to provably resist fingerprinting, using the ideas from differential privacy [wikipedia.org]. I understand the skepticism, which derives from decades of Google tracking (though, honestly, I think the assumptions about tracking are a lot worse than the reality — which should be clear from the relatively low quality of ad targeting), but Topics is specifically designed to support Google’s ability to sell ads, without data collect

Really, because this feels like a new vector to fingerprint users with. Google doesn’t have a great track record with any of the stuff that has overlapped with their ability to sell ads, so I don’t think anyone should give them trust here. Would love to know more.
Actually quite the opposite. Google has an excellent track record of removing the ability for 3rd parties to fingerprint users. They hate it when the competition does what they do themselves.
Stopping 3rd parties from fingerprinting you doesn’t overlap with their ability to sell ads, it actively promotes it.

Google will disable third-party cookies in Chrome for good, marking the end of their decades-long reign of privacy-violating terror.
I don’t think this will end Google’s decades-long reign of privacy-violating terror….
What i want to know is what edge?
All this tracking, and nothing i get ads for things i have looked at recently but just because i was watching a show doesnt mean i need to see a million ads about it.
Ads are to raise brand awareness if you are already aware of thr brand then more ads is wasted money.

With Topics, Chrome will keep track of all the websites you’re looking at and sort you into a variety of categories. This tracking happens in your browser and the data stays on your device. Neither Google nor anyone else gets to see your browsing history or learn anything about you as an individual throughout this process.
OK, so how does Google make money??
Yeah, this is Google’s baked-in tracking. You’ll be tracked, your info sold to advertisers, and you can’t opt out. Your best bet is to ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox.

Your info is what they sell. And not only to advertisers. Data-hungry government services use it also.
It’s really not. Google has never derived any significant revenues from selling data.

Your info is what they sell. And not only to advertisers. Data-hungry government services use it also.
No it’s not. Your info is Google’s recipe for Coca Cola. It is never sold directly. Rather it is used to make products that they do sell, i.e. your eyeballs and access to you.
You don’t seem to understand how the ad business works. Only very few companies who do not see data as their primary business actually sell the data, (e.g. Verizon).
Google will never sell this information for a few reasons, the biggest one being anti-trust.
The goal is to get rid of 3rd party cookies, and reduce the longevity of 1st party cookies. Since websites rely on those for targeted advertising, if Google just disabled them they would be hit with anti-trust investigations over their attempt to eliminate all the competition in the ad business. Similarly, setting themselves up as the only data broker on the internet would get the interest of regulators pretty quickl

and you can’t opt out
You specifically can opt out. But users won’t. Privacy is dead, people don’t care, and if you think otherwise you’ll need to talk to the people in question… who can best be reached by messaging them on Facebook.
If the McDonalds corporation decided to stop selling fast food tomorrow, they would likely be able to survive on nothing more than turning themselves into a real estate management company, to rent out some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.
Something tells me the largest mega-corps on the planet do hold some financial flexibility to become chameleons within some pet projects. Not like all of Google’s revenue suddenly stopped with this move…
I don’t know what google is up to, exactly, but … anything that gets rid of all those “Our site uses cookies…” popups is good by me.
OTOH if the browser is doing all this internally then it doesn’t sound like it’s easy to block. It’s not like blocking doubleclick or google analytics in your hosts file any more.
Sounds pretty easy to block – by not using Chrome.
The problem here is that we’re returning to the IE4 era of websites only being designed to work in specific browsers. Even as it is today, there are lots of sites that just plain don’t work if you don’t have a Chrome-like browser and a chunk of the scripts on the site permitted. Hell, just today on one of the sites linked from Slashdot on the article about the Switch 2, it won’t load images unless you accept non-required cookies. I imagine the bar will just be moved from cookies to whatever this new data st

Sounds pretty easy to block – by not using Chrome.
Where Chrome goes, others usually follow.

Sounds pretty easy to block – by not using Chrome.
Where Chrome goes, others usually follow.
In this case that’s a good thing, because what Chrome is doing is good for users and for the web.
When all browsers have killed third-party cookies, the era of massive data collection on the web will be at an end. If it doesn’t come with something like Topics, which enables targeted advertising without data collection, the end of third-party cookies will also be the end of the web’s economic model. Sites will either die or paywall.
Prediction: Google Chrome’s popularity will remain unchanged and no one will give a shit.
Anyone who cares about this will already not be using Chrome.

anything that gets rid of all those “Our site uses cookies…” popups is good by me.
They’re replacing third-party cookies, not cookies. Practically every website will continue to use cookies. This merely prevents a site from serving you a cookie hosted on a third-party server, so active cookies will only be those originating on the site you are actually viewing. This has been the default behavior on Firefox and Safari for quite some time.

OTOH if the browser is doing all this internally then it doesn’t sound like it’s easy to block.
That’s the whole point. Google found a way to redirect demands for privacy into a data monopoly. Marketers no longer have access to nearly as much data from Google Ads/Analytics as they once had. . .but Google still does. Now all the data is housed in Google’s black box. Third-party data brokers and ad services have been tripping over themselves because their targeting has been completely ineffective since Apple rolled out their privacy protections. Now they will have nothing to offer.
What Google has effectively done is say, “Everyone can now have privacy on the internet. . .except nothing is private from Google.”
I’m deeply skeptical all 3p cookies can be blocked — those blue “f” and tweeter (X?) icons infesting many, many content pages are tagged images from 3p servers who can inquire for cookies.
The longer term goal is for most cookies to go away, and cookies to be limited to short lifespans. Combined with making it easier to log in to websites, it won’t be necessary to keep cookies from sites you haven’t visited for more than a month or two.
That will be a big privacy win because it will break most online tracking, except for websites that you visit regularly. And even those websites won’t be able to see what other websites you visit, unless they share accounts and you are logged in to multiple pla

What Google has effectively done is say, “Everyone can now have privacy on the internet. . .except nothing is private from Google.”
I don’t think you understand the changes. Google won’t have access to any of your data; it’ll never leave your device. Google will have control over how your device deduces topics of interest to you, but all advertisers will get to see the outputs of that process. So Google is in a sense in control… but without access to your data, and it’s hard to see how they get a signficant competitive advantage, since the browser will serve the same topics to all ad networks.

I don’t know what google is up to, exactly, but … anything that gets rid of all those “Our site uses cookies…” popups is good by me.
This does not do that.
Ah, you think google is going to let users define their own ad profiles??
This is just Google raising the barrier of entry, so no other company can follow their old footsteps build up a database of users profiles for delivering ads.
It is no different from the tactics used in other industries, such as regulatory capture. Instead of legal barrier, Google just use technical ones.

This is just Google raising the barrier of entry, so no other company can follow their old footsteps build up a database of users profiles for delivering ads.
It is no different from the tactics used in other industries, such as regulatory capture. Instead of legal barrier, Google just use technical ones.
I don’t think you understand the technical architecture here. This change also kills Google’s ability to build a database of user profiles. The user profile data will exist only on user devices and never be sent anywhere. And it doesn’t even give Google an advantage over other ad networks, because the topics list derived from it will be provided to all ad networks, not just Google’s.
You don’t need a cookie banner or disclaimer for the EU; only if you use them for privacy invasion, then you need permission (and most sites do use it for more than just session tracking.) You can’t disable functionality if they decline either. Every website should be required to disclose they spy on you and let you opt out in some way. if you let people decline and be kicked they’ll screw themselves nearly all the time; as they already choose to do with smartphones. Get them hooked then change terms of se
I remember a time when web browsers had the functionality to just browse the web…
It is interesting how I had to go through several links from the article so that I could finally confirm what is one very interesting (I suppose?) aspect of this tech for Slashdot, which is the use of PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) as the tech behind Privacy Sandbox. It is the sorts of Homomorphic Encryption, Multi-Party Computation and other fun stuff. Worth researching about it. Besides the fact that the data is held by Google Chrome, if the tech is well applied then it can indeed add a lot more pr
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.
Clubhouse Is Pivoting From Live Audio To Group Messaging
Grindr Loses Nearly Half Its Staff To Strict Return-To-Work Rule
egrep -n ‘^[a-z].*(‘ $ | sort -t’:’ +2.0

source