[HN Gopher] Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefo...
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Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefox/Safari)
Author : kreyenborgi
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-09-13 08:46 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.mozilla.org)
| brokensegue wrote:
| Are there extensions that disable this?
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Do you mean in Chrome? You can disable it from the settings.
| There should have been a prompt to review the features'
| settings when it was first introduced.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > There should have been a prompt to review the features'
| settings when it was first introduced.
|
| Although it was phrased disingenuously as a pro-privacy
| switch that you should obviously turn on.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Is there any way I can find where this topic information is
| stored? I presume it's a SQLite database in the profile folder,
| like the cookies and history.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't know about on disk, but you can look at it in Setting >
| Privacy and Security > Ad Privacy > Ad Topics.
|
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Request for positions on the topics API -
| https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111 also
| mentioned in https://github.com/mozilla/standards-
| positions/issues/622
|
| The Register article on the topics api last year
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_...
| etchalon wrote:
| Oh look, an easy new way to fingerprint users.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Infer topics of interest from the site URL
|
| Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results
| for most sites?
| mattnewton wrote:
| I haven't read the spec entirely, but couldn't "infer" mean
| "check with a compressed list of millions of urls already
| categorized offline and cached on disk" ?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet another step into ChromeOSissification of the Web.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Break up Google fast. We need tech to return to the true hacker
| spirit.
| yndoendo wrote:
| This looks like anti-privacy with extra steps. This breaks the
| disconnection that iframe provides. Kind of like turning iframe
| into a detective. Were you interested in tennis on the night of
| January 3rd?
| userbinator wrote:
| The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed
| to...
|
| 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 )
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Google's defense is apparently "well it's better than 3rd party
| cookies"
|
| 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.
| adv0r wrote:
| from iab context taxonomy
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(page generated 2024-09-15 23:00 UTC)