Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.
Google seemingly knows this won’t be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.
Don’t use Chrome or any of its derivatives. If you care about privacy and the open web, use Firefox or one of its even more privacy-conscious alternatives, such as LibreWolf. Chrome has always been deeply problematic, but with this ridiculous “Privacy Sandbox”, the browser has effectively become a tool to show you ads first, and a browse second. Mark my words – the total gutting of adblocking in Chrome is up next.
Is this Strictly Chrome or will this bleed into android as well?
Given the root certificate issue from a previous article, I think it’s safe to say that it most certainly will be coming to Android.
The same settings are present in Chrome for Android, they can be turned off (for now) and on mine they were off by default
Given the amount of extra data the phone could collect compared to merely a single browser: yes.
On top of that, it’ll be using “ai” to determine at what moment it can best serve you ads. “Best” as in “best for google”.
People seem to give people a pass on Android when the whole point of Android is to be an ad platform for Google which is why it’s so cheap to vendors. Same with Chrome OS.
Does anyone have an ‘idiot’s guide’ to installing Ladybird on Ubuntu? I tried following their instructions on the github but they’re clearly making assumptions about the user either knowing stuff already or having had previous installs of SerenityOS because after grabbing dependencies I hit a brick wall.
As much as I have loved Firefox in the past, their insane desire to be Chrome Lite means it’s only a matter of time before they too do similar stuff. We need an actually independent and free browser.
As much as I love Ladybird, it is too soon. For example, I could not yet leave this comment in Ladybird as, while Osnews renders quite well, the implementation of is still incomplete.
Development has been going quite quickly though. Let’s hope it is not too long until Ladybird is a real alternative. Once that happens, I think you will see it appear as a package in distros like Ubuntu. It is already in the AUR if you use Arch.
If you have cloned the SerenityOS Github repository, you can build and launch Ladybird with “Meta/serenity.sh run lagom ladybird”.
Vivaldi claims to be and that it will remain free from this “privacy sandbox” creep. See this blog post: https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/alert-no-google-topics-in-vivaldi/
Vivaldi isn’t Free or open source though, and they admit on their website that they make money from selling your search data in a different way. From their own blog post about it:
– https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model
I’m sure they are far more trustworthy than Google as a shepherd of your data, but they aren’t open source and they make money from selling your search metadata, two things that are a non-starter for anyone serious about their online privacy.
In that blog post they literally state:
> Yet, at Vivaldi, we don’t track or profile you. Nor do we collect usage data.
What they admit to in your quote are referrals, not the selling of data.
Regardless, it actually prefer for them to remove the search engines (and speed dial ads) from the browser and switch to an old fashioned “purchase the browser” model.
This is highly illegal in sweden and they can face serious fines and also jail time.
Hope they have a good lawyer, since jury trials is almost non-existant in sweden.
Is this really “highly illegal in Sweden”? Have you specifically looked at that yourself?
I am no expert but it was not obvious to me after a quick reading of the Swedish regulations. It appears to me that Topics was created specifically to avoid problems with the GDPR and, while the Swedish laws go further, they seem crafted along the same lines. For one thing, these laws focus primarily on data retained by third-parties. The three-weeks Topics history is collected and retained by the browser itself ( on the users machine ). In theory, there is no server side user tracking at all.
Are we going to acknowledge that third-party cookies are a far more invasive “user tracking ad platform” that is “baked in” to all browsers at the moment? The Topics API is party of Google’s intent to remove 3rd party cookies without completely destroying the advertising ecosystem.
Given that the website I am using right now is clearly funded by advertising, I do understand the value that I get from the advertising driven nature of the web. Expecting that I will continue to get all the free stuff I currently enjoy on the web today if all advertising is eliminated seems very naive. As such, the question is “what is the best way to allow ad-targeting on the Internet?”.
To my eye, the Topics API seems like a far, far better system than 3rd party cookies. If adopting Topics allows me to eliminate the massively invasive and fine-grained tracking that cookies allow, I will take it.
tanishaj,
They can both be bad for privacy at the same time….
While a client side database is less invasive than a server side database, even assuming the algorithm works as advertised, personally I’m still not comfortable with the browser automatically leaking my browsing preferences for advertising purposes. The git repository shows that google started with 350 categories and they’re up to 469. Presumably google will continue to update the list as time goes by to make more fine grained categories.
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v2.md
Fortunately I didn’t see any medical categories like abortion services, or sexual preferences, which would be a huge red flag in terms of leaking highly personal information. But still some of these categories may be sensitive. Would you want your employer to see that you are job hunting or looking to change careers? Or a prospective employer to see that you’ve been looking up child care and parenting resources? It just seems like an unnecessary risk to have the world’s dominant browser provide APIs to automatically hand out this information.
tanishaj,
I wanted to add that I don’t have objections to 1st party advertising where website owners cut out the middle men including google. 1st party ads don’t create any additional privacy issues the way google does. Unfortunately google cannot/will not fix this because they are the problem. Their empire is built on 3rd party advertising.