Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefox/Safari)
developer.mozilla.org
developer.mozilla.org
> Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out... We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586
There are numerous ways that the Topics API could leak sensitive information (say, for instance, increased values for a set of topics statistically related to life events with legal/health consequences) - I'm glad that opposition is being highlighted.
Apple's opposition comments are also worth reviewing: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111
(a) Widespread use of the engine which means its behaviour is what is largely defining the rules of the web today.
(b) It is driven by the financial interests of Google, specifically their Ads division. For example: Google recklessly adds every API under the sun even though they know they are being abused for fingerprinting. And they have long lived first party cookies which are used for re-targeting, attribution and conversion tracking. Both of which have major impacts to ad revenue.
The Register article on the topics api last year https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_...
Well we're getting rid of 3rd party cookies... so like, that was the absolute minimum bar.
It's a curious list of topics: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
Does anyone know how the taxonomy was created.
They simply have websites use first party cookies, send the data server side to data harvesters, tie it all to a global user profile using either identifiers from the website or from fingerprinting and then serve targeted ads.
i.e. Conversions API (Meta), Server Side GTM (Google)
I would be surprised if most advertisers would even be interested in this topic API.
This is legally tricky because GDPR and similar legislation requires getting explicit consent from users for this to happen. Currently this is not very well enforced (imo) but it seems likely that enforcement will become increasingly stringent in years to come.
That honestly sounds like circumvention of unauthorized access. That's just breaking software protections.
A basically permanent ID. Unified ID2 is one version of this.
The 3rd party cookie ban and heavy pushback against alternative solutions suggested by Google just pushed advertisers into going an even worse route privacy wise.
E.g.; I tend to want recipes by French authors. I have a profile set up in my browser to search in French, prefer French results, and when localization is applicable to retrieve results written in France. Switching to this profile is a button-click and automagically affects what all websites I visit believe out my personna.
E.g.; In that same example, even ad-tech presumably benefits from believing my ruse. If I'm in a mood to read French recipes in French, an ad for a US Football game is probably not going to land very well. Perhaps some company could do better by targeting based on both who I am and who I'm purporting to be (especially with respect to important life characteristics like log10(salary) and count(children)), but the temporary personna is by itself likely already better than any inferred characteristics at guiding targeted ads.
E.g.; I throw on a DIY personna. Instead of being inundated with (mostly fake) repair services when I ask for bike or device repair information, I find links to solid content like Sheldon Brown's blog and commercial links to informational content, DIY-focused parts and tools for sale, .... The web can still be a for-profit, sanitized entity while providing a vastly better experience for me the searcher and also the poor sucker paying for "bike repair shop" ads on my searches which could never possibly convert for that concept.
It's clear that mainstream browsers have become the exact opposite of user agents. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution to that problem beyond educating web developers and users, to change course to avoid all this hostile complexity, and possibly creating more alternative browsers that explicitly don't support things like this (or will lie about it to preserve the interests of the user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 )
To a certain extent, I expect people to do exactly that as part of an argument in good faith, especially in a technical context. If you can't explain to me how something works, why should I trust your feedback, be it positive or negative?
No means no. DO NOT WANT. End of argument.
Let's use WEI as an example. You're clear enough in your opinion: you think it shouldn't exist. Why, though? What does it do that you object to? Do you understand how it works well enough to be sure it does the bad thing you think it does? Imagine I'm interested in the discussion, but haven't formed an opinion. I just have Google on one side talking about guaranteeing the integrity of the browser environment somehow, and you saying "DO NOT WANT" on the other. You'll have a much easier time convincing me of your point of view if you can simply show me that you actually understand WEI, and if you can make me understand it too.
It's a documentation site. You want it to pretend the API doesn't exist, or what?
> It's clear that mainstream browsers have become the exact opposite of user agents.
If I'm interpreting you correctly, please explain how you got from "mozilla.org documents this API" to "firefox is not acting as a user agent".
If I'm interpreting you correctly, please explain how you got from "mozilla.org documents this API" to "firefox is not acting as a user agent".
I'm speaking about browsers in general.
>MDN Web Docs content is maintained by Mozilla, Google employees, and volunteers (community of developers and technical writers). It also contains content contributed by Microsoft, Google, and Samsung who, in 2017, announced they would shut down their own web documentation projects and move all their documentation to MDN Web Docs
I kind of want to emphasize "Mozilla's" too. It's not firefox documentation, it's web documentation.
> I'm speaking about browsers in general.
But you're specifically including firefox because of this page, right? That's a hell of extrapolation to make from them "helping" chrome by writing/hosting an article.
In what way is documenting the API helping Google? There's a big banner right at the top of the page saying Firefox and Safari aren't going to implement it.
Should Mozilla also not document -webkit- prefixed CSS properties?
MDN is a documentation site for web technologies.
In order for something to become a web standard, it needs two independent implementations. If Google can’t build consensus or convince anybody outside of Google to implement it, it’s not a web technology, it’s just some Google API that Google built for Google’s needs.
This is out of scope for a site dedicated to web technologies. This is like expecting them to document Android APIs.
In fact, MDN includes non-standardized APIs as well. Browser-specific interfaces are included, because it turns out that if you only document the APIs that went through the standardization process and not the ones that actually exist, it makes for a bad documentation site.
I'd say a better comparison is JSX, and searching for that I do see pages on MDN about it.
I'm not well informed of how Mozilla is run, but isn't it just a business? Does it have any consistent values? I would assume that all decisions made by Mozilla are a balancing act between money and pr.
Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results for most sites?
It could work in the degenerated case of just having a giant dictionary of the top hundred million websites and all their topics, so it stands to reason it could work with "ai" too. Each region's browsing behavior is so "head heavy" I would think you'd rarely need to interpolate to see things that weren't in the "training set" of offline categorized sites.
When I look at mine, Ad Topics always been very generic and boring. “Site-suggested ads” seems more worrisome because some domain names are very specific.
Although it was phrased disingenuously as a pro-privacy switch that you should obviously turn on.
It's one thing that my non-tech sphere friends do, but I see so many people at work just defaulting to using Google Chrome, and I frankly just cannot fathom it.
Like, FFS, is browser sync that useful? In 30+ years using the web on a bunch of different computers, I have not once ever been like "ooooh I wish I had the 35+ tabs I had open on my work computer on my personal one".
And for the rest of us devs who actually care, we're just lazy and continue using the work browser for private purposes. Why Chrome as work browser? Because most users use it.