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.)
In addition, there seems to be a sentiment that there should be no targeted ads altogether. To be honest I'm not sure how this looks in practice. I think it's pretty obvious that no targeted ads mean fewer sales and therefore less revenue. Google has margins that could be dug into, fine. However this revenue is also shared by the open web that's funded by ads. It's also shared by small businesses that advertise. Generally those two groups have less margin to spare. How does the open web look like in this kind of status quo? How about local economies where the actual businesses who advertise operate? Ads on the web aren't some small thing that is kind of up in the air, separate from "the real economy" anymore. 🤔
Besides all of that, targeted ads help people find stuff. Web ads used to be terribly useless in the 2000s. Over time they actually got pretty useful for me. Over the years I've found many products that I had no clue about as well as promos via well targeted ads. I don't enjoy ads, but some of the things I use and love came from them. I definitely don't want to go back to the useless ad shit show landscape of the earlier internet.
An ad-free web is definitely a pipe dream. But a targeted ad-free web should be a simple option available to users. I'd guess that the majority of the public doesn't care too much about being tracked, and may even appreciate having their relevant interests targeted so that they see an ad that is more interesting to them. The problem is that, for those of us who don't want to be targeted, there is no simple way to disable that. Companies have baked their ad targeting directly into the functionality of their platforms so it's incredibly difficult to avoid targeted ads if you still want to use the most popular sites. I think this is the reality that is unacceptable.
Every browser should have a simple toggle to enable targeted ads and it should be every site should respect this. I'm not super educated on Google's Topics solution, but maybe the step away from cookies could theoretically support that kind of reality. I don't think Google is going to lead the charge on that kind of change, but we certainly need to get away from cookies somehow.