this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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It’s a little ridiculous how people misunderstand this issue. This is literally to do away with the extremely privacy-invasive tracking that has been done using cookies and telemetry for years. You will be tracked less in Chrome than you did before, because the browser will hand off less information to sites you visit and there will be a degree of randomisation. This is to get rid of cookies soon, and to randomise the information a site gets when you visit instead of the whole deal.
It is, of course, more personalised than blocking all cookies and randomising telemetry, but if you were doing that, I expect you weren’t using Chrome to begin with. Using a Chrome browser with Topics is inherently more privacy-forward than using Chrome as it has been so far. Honestly, I hope that the deprecation of cookies will even help *Fox users down the lines as they become irrelevant to a large part of the web users.
If you want a solid explanation of what is actually happening with Topics, Security Now episode 935 explains the details. The transcript dives into Topics on page 9, explains the technicalities on page 12 and if you just want the conclusion, you can skip to the penultimate page and read the last few paragraphs in here: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-935-notes.pdf (you can listen as well if you’d rather.)
Unlike Web Integrity Protection this is a reasonable step in the right direction. Can it break down the line? Sure. But then we’re back at where we were. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to use Firefox and Safari and hope that this will eventually help stop the cookie banner nightmare on those browsers as well (even if the cookies do nothing.)
People aren't misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they're doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world's largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.
I don’t disagree as such, and I won’t use Chrome, but objectively it is better than what we had in Chrome. While many of us refuse/block ads/tracking completely, many users will now have better privacy with ads that are not micro-targeted on their individual but more broadly targeted with a generalised interest area that varies per visit and adjusts over time to keep it relevant.
IF a user doesn’t disable ads completely, this seems a decent way to make the ads somewhat relevant to the user without the horrible tracking methods in use today. Objectively that’s a better state than seeing ads for something completely irrelevant to the user. Again, this is not relevant for most of us in here, and I sincerely hope most of us don’t use a Chrome-based browser to begin with, but for the average internet user, for whom this is designed, I’d argue it’s a net positive.