They’ve backed out of their promise to do no evil long time ago.. I have no reasons for still using chrome from time to time or at work where I prefer it over the obnoxious Edge.
Firefox user at home though…
Formally they never removed "don't be evil" from their code of conduct, although it's now part of the last sentence rather than a standalone sentence at the beginning of the preface as it used to be, and I think it's far more often disregarded by their policymaking levels of leadership than it was in their earlier years.
Much of the media reporting got this wrong when Google made this change in 2018.
They never promised to "do no evil", and that's become increasingly evident over time.
Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, most recently more than 8 years ago now, but I have never been in any way part of Google's policymaking leadership ranks and am certainly not speaking for them here.
Or one of the other small independents that won't work with sites that have drunk the Goog-Aid, but will be perfectly fine and even preferable on the rest of the document web, and even some of the interactive ones (old-school forums and the like.)
>So tell me again why I would ever use a browser created by an adTech company?
So tell me again why I would ever use a browser that lacks functional vertical tabs? Yes, some chrome-based browsers have vertical tabs (brave, others?), but no browser can compare to the functionality of Firefox with Sidebery. Too bad Mozilla doesn't care about Firefox enough to bake it in and trying to turn off the damn horizontal tabs is such a convoluted process.
I'll also note that Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is hilariously bad.
And to those of you who still use horizontal tabs - if you keep more than a handful of tabs open at once, you need to graduate to the clearly superior UX of vertical tabs.
> with the only privacy safeguard is a pinky promise?
Using the internet in any modern capacity can basically be summed up with this phrase. Unless you're running a PinePhone with a browser you compiled yourself, you're throwing stones from a glass house.
Is there any evidence that Apple is using your browsing history to sell ads? Are they putting their super secret ad web tracking functionality in Safari. But not putting it in WebKit?
This article isn't about building ads into chrome or any other browser. It's about technology that's replacing third party cookies for enabling targeted advertising. IOW it won't change the effectiveness of your ad blocker.
My ad blocker also prevents tracking by blocking urls used to send information to aggregators. When the tracking is built into the browser, ad blocking can’t block it.
> "With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like 'Fitness' or 'Travel & Transportation,' that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history," explained Vinay Goel, product director of Privacy Sandbox at Google, last year.
There really needs to be a serious push to remove Chrome's dominance over the internet.
Google is clearly trying to shape the internet for themselves and that is way too much power. (Not that the other companies don't sometimes have ulterior motives, but the impact of those motives just happen to align with my privacy preferences)
Everytime we discuss this here, there are still a ton of ways people defend using Chrome. It’s like being sucked into the network effect and they feel powerless without using Chrome.
I would like to counter that and say that diversity is better for the ecosystem than any gain you might find in using Chrome. Use Brave, Firefox… any other of the new browsers… anything really that brings more choice and less power to Google. It’s about balance.
The IE6 era had lots of websites "designed for IE". Once IE became dominant enough, most people stopped caring about cross-browser compatibility. Which made it even harder to get out of the browser monopoly
Way to dismiss everybody else's opinions. You won't win the "war" by doing that.
I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc).
So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.
I should also 'know better', yet I still use chrome despite a growing distrust of google.
I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better).
The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google).
There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
The browser is a very sensitive piece of software (most of the data I receive and send goes through it every day) and I can't trust the creators of small forks. I also can't trust they are updated fast enough.
Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
I've been back to using Firefox for about 3 years now, never seen an ad from it. What do you mean by "show ads every now and then"? I really don't remember one single instance of being shown an ad in the browser since I got fed up with Chrome's bullshit.
At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
Mozilla should definitely get their act together, but using Google Chrome because you're concerned about ads in other brothers is ironic, to say the least. Chrome doesn't need to serve you ads in the browser because they can track your data to serve you very profitable ads everywhere, and they can hamstring ad blockers with things like Manifest V3.
I'm not defending the ads in Firefox, it's just that when it comes to advertising we're really in a place of choosing the lesser of evils.
Mozilla has been doing this stupid thing where every once in a long while (maybe after an update?) Firefox opens a tab with an ad for their VPN or something similarly stupid. I hope they’re making money hand over fist with it because the reputational effect of built in ads for other Mozilla programs is bad.
You have to go into about:config and set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false to disable them. No way to turn them off for regular users.
>they can track your data to serve you very profitable ads everywhere
Where? I don't see ads absolutely anywhere.
>they can hamstring ad blockers with things like Manifest V3
I've been hearing about this for years and it still hasn't happened. When the change occurs, if I begin seeing ads, I will abandon Chrome. But until then I will keep using it.
I use Firefox, but not because it's more polished than Chrome. It's not.
A small thing that annoys me: ctrl/cmd + click on bookmark doesn't behave like the same click on a web page (opening in the background). There are changes that can be made to about:config, but it's a mess, behaviour is different between a bookmark and bookmark folders, sometimes it switches you to the new tab, etc.
I've also noticed that JS performance isn't as good on some sites. For example, the hash step on VirusTotal takes way longer for larger files on Firefox than it does on Chrome.
The messy profile switch is also annoying, especially when they've supported the feature for years. And no, containers are not a replacement for profiles.
So I agree that Firefox needs to improve. The average user won't use it just because it supports the "open web"... do they even know what that means?
This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome.
I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work.
I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.
> This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome. ... but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox
The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
Is there a reason to use brave besides being a contrarian? Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies. And it's still a chromium browser. Sure they could disable evil feature X, if you trust them to decide which features are evil and Chrome doesn't have a setting to disable that feature, but if Google decided to remove a feature that you liked, Brave would have no way* of adding it back.
* Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
> Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies.
Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian.
You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.
Google Chrome and vanilla Chromium have little to distinguish them outside of branding. The difference is not one of repositories but of build flags.
Suggesting Lynx as an alternative clarifies that your remarks are unserious, or you are out of touch with reality --- charitably I will assume the former.
But is the Topics API part of upstream Chromium? Because I'm not a browser developer, but the article does not say that the Topics API is being added to Chromium. It says that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I don't want to presume the outcome of whatever you respond to the former question with, because as I said, I am not a browser developer. But it would seem to me that your argument is irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
I rarely experience something not working on Firefox. When I do I go with Brave which usually works. If it doesn't I fire up an email or click on Contact Us page and send an email. Most of the time companies are quite responsive and fix this.
I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work.
Ok, so one day you have a single engine and everything works through that one engine. Google gets say a new CEO who does things that are contrary to what you want (say they become like Microsoft) What you gonna do? Nowhere, because you don’t have choice left. All important things work ONLY through that engine.
For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
What is the alternative? Apple is the only other major investor in a web browser and frankly they have little interest in making any sort of progress on the web. The web would have been dead already if not for Google.
Anyone interested in competing with Chrome today would do well to look at the webcomic[0] that they released when they rolled out Chrome.
Chrome was targeted at developers from the outset. The comic explains "why Chrome" in a way that makes very little sense to a lay person but shows why Chrome is far better than what developers were developing against up until that point. Google sold Chrome on its technical merits, and technical people could easily sell it to friends and family because everyone already used Google and liked it. They had a compelling story for what was wrong with existing browsers and they had strong name recognition.
I think the problem with efforts to compete with Chrome so far is that they miss both these things. I'm a privacy fan myself, but it's pretty clear that privacy alone isn't enough of a selling point the way "a browser that works like an operating system" was. There has to be something else to set the browser apart. And then once you have that distinguishing feature to appeal to the technical crowd, you need some way to make it easy to recommend the friends and family. That's especially difficult in today's browser environment.
> That's the API that's supposed to allow advertisers to target netizens with adverts tailored to their individual interests without impinging on people's privacy.
> And to help prevent those privacy problems, the ad giant is asking advertisers to promise they won't abuse this ad targeting mechanism.
Ah, what a relief. Asking gently this to advertisers with the Do-Not-Track HTTP header has worked well, after all!
Google, of all companies, should know what happens to these things at scale. Everything that can be abused will be. If your feature will be abused, is it still worth it?
Google might be mostly thinking about how they are absolved of liability and responsibility, after all they asked everyone to super-pinky-promise not to abuse it. Anyone abusing it so did so against Google's express wish and against their promise to Google, so Google really couldn't have done anything here. /s
> the API that's supposed to allow advertisers to target netizens with adverts tailored to their individual interests without impinging on people's privacy
1. malevolent advertiser creates an ad campaign for cat-food but targeted at people who are interested in bondage.
2. user who is into bondage and owns a cat sees the ad, clicks on it, orders the cat food, types their home address and personal info. Note: user is unaware of the bondage link.
3. malevolent advertiser now has another datapoint containing the bondage connection with personal info.
Yes, if you assume the people who designed this API were idiots, and everyone who reviewed the proposals were idiots, that could be possible outcome. (Not a likely outcome, mind you, because it'd be an incredibly low-value and low-yield attack). But why just assume that, rather than read the actual proposal?
In reality, the topics come from a predefined taxonomy[0] that certainly won't include topics like "bondage", nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII. Additionally the system inserts noise into the system (5% of the time the topic will be a random choice rather than one of your actual inferred topics of interest), so that you can't actually infer the user's real interests from a single ad click like that.
And we all know that policies, like end user agreements, never change. They are especially never changed unilaterally by commercial entities for which the change could be beneficial to their business plans (directly, or by virtual of a lobbying party negotiating an exchange of conveniences).
Even if what you say is true, they still leak my data!
Also, there's a lot you can do with innocent looking data, simply through correlations. Just like people like to generalize from skin color (I mean, what is more innocent than skin color?) I'm pretty sure that you can even infer skin color from things like "likes R&B music" and a few similar datapoints. Of course, you don't get exact information but statistics can be enough to hurt someone. That's also why your noise argument doesn't make much sense.
I don't disagree with your argument, but I think you're making it in a way that's tautological, and a bit disingenuous. You're saying "this API has privacy concerns" and then point to some privacy concerns. However, you aren't taking into account that it's not this specific API that has privacy concerns. Any advertising API would have privacy concerns, because it's explicit goal is to be able to target users for ads.
Pointing to some stuff and saying "this API that's made to target users allows user targeting" isn't bringing anything new, really.
Google made one of the biggest pivots in history that the average person has no clue about. Rooted in search, pivoted to advertising, sort of like how McDonald's is one of the world's largest real estate companies due to owning the land that McDonald's restaurants are built upon.
I wonder what would happen if every single web user decided to use an ad-blocker? Would the internet just, shut down because no one could make money anymore? Or would they figure it out like the record industry did when they couldn't sell physical discs anymore?
Constant AB testing and AI garbage is what would happen. The next frontier of advertising is GPT tailored content with ads added inline. You take the base content and run it through to subtly add a reference to the product being advertised in exactly the way that has been proven to be effective to the user. Perfect targeting.
By making web standards so complex only well-funded corporate efforts can maintain a browser, we've insured browsers represent corporate interests ahead of user interests.
We must cut this Gordian knot while still can. Some combination of public funding for browser development, and making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards, that will slowly get made simpler [1]. Perhaps the corporate browsers should be forced to display a scary red warning for incompatible websites, even if the browser is able to render them (like Google does if it whimsically decides a website is phishing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470078).
Just like we forbid radio jamming, polluting the web should be restricted, if we want to maintain some semblance of usability.
As for the API itself.. it is interesting how ads based on website content aren't even considered. If something as blunt and expensive as a poster next to a highway is viable, why do we let Google lie to us that only surveillance-based advertising can fund the web?
[1] Old content gets to follow the standards of when it was published.
I honestly can't think of a bigger waste of public money. It will cost billions and billions, we will get nothing useful, and then it will be abandoned.
> making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards
I don't know what this means. Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard? What happens if it's not? Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
> I honestly can't think of a bigger waste of public money.
Say that again when the address bar says "brought to you by Pepsi™", and every website you visit is sent to the manufacturer - like LG TVs sent filenames found on USBs back to LG.
> It will cost billions and billions
Mozilla spends $400+ million per year, and they've been at it for more than a decade. It already costs billions.
> we will get nothing useful
Even if the funding goes to Mozilla? Are Google's dollars magical?
> Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard?
I'm suggesting you keep the domain, but it doesn't resolve until the content is standard-compliant. Or, alternately, for-profit corporate and publicly-funded browsers are obligated to display a scary warning.
> Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
What do you find so hard to understand? Do you think the domain namespace shouldn't be managed like a public good?
You're big on cynical criticism of my suggestions, but are my predictions wrong? How do you think the growing cost to develop a browser will be funded, if not by selling out? What do you think will happen? What has been happening so far?
Having read the article, I'm guessing you're meant to fingerprint your visitors and then exploit their identity somehow. That's what counts as "breaking" the API.
I mean yeah probably. You know what else does that? Removing 3rd party cookies and not adding an advertisement API to replace it. Literally effortless.
I believe chrome had been a good product but at this point it is clear the policy makers are no longer people who care about it as a browser (some may argue that was always the case) and are now just execs from the adsense branch.
Ok, technically only the UK explicitly forbid it. But having something be pre-emptively investigated for antitrust issues by both the US and EU even before launch is functionally the same thing.
> we've added a requirement on Chrome that developers enroll to use the API and to attest that they won't abuse the API," he wrote. "That's not a technical solution, but I do believe it goes a long way to addressing this problem. Closing for now."
Honestly kind of sad. The whole Google mystique is about not pretending this sort of nonsense will work.
I don’t see how adding an additional data point that the browser leaks (topics) is an improvement no matter how privacy conscious that is designed. Something else would need to be removed for that to be a win and realistically fingerprinting is going nowhere.
So we’re moving from fingerprinting to fingerprinting plus more data.
110 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadhttps://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
Much of the media reporting got this wrong when Google made this change in 2018.
They never promised to "do no evil", and that's become increasingly evident over time.
Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, most recently more than 8 years ago now, but I have never been in any way part of Google's policymaking leadership ranks and am certainly not speaking for them here.
Adtech company's browser
the adtech reskin
the browser company almost wholly funded by the adtech company
OR Vendor and device restricted browser that won't work if you, say, wish to use Windows or Linux (incl android).
https://browser.kagi.com
So tell me again why I would ever use a browser that lacks functional vertical tabs? Yes, some chrome-based browsers have vertical tabs (brave, others?), but no browser can compare to the functionality of Firefox with Sidebery. Too bad Mozilla doesn't care about Firefox enough to bake it in and trying to turn off the damn horizontal tabs is such a convoluted process.
I'll also note that Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is hilariously bad.
And to those of you who still use horizontal tabs - if you keep more than a handful of tabs open at once, you need to graduate to the clearly superior UX of vertical tabs.
That’s not a hard tradeoff.
Using the internet in any modern capacity can basically be summed up with this phrase. Unless you're running a PinePhone with a browser you compiled yourself, you're throwing stones from a glass house.
No thank you.
Google is clearly trying to shape the internet for themselves and that is way too much power. (Not that the other companies don't sometimes have ulterior motives, but the impact of those motives just happen to align with my privacy preferences)
I would like to counter that and say that diversity is better for the ecosystem than any gain you might find in using Chrome. Use Brave, Firefox… any other of the new browsers… anything really that brings more choice and less power to Google. It’s about balance.
Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2.
Indeed. The IE dominance and then stagnation set back web development for half a decade at least.
That's a good thing. People figured out how to do more with less, and make it compatible cross-browser too.
I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc).
So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.
And some "farther from the tree" variants like Vivaldi are not as shady as, say, Opera.
I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better).
The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google).
There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
Last month, for example:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360
I'm not defending the ads in Firefox, it's just that when it comes to advertising we're really in a place of choosing the lesser of evils.
You have to go into about:config and set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false to disable them. No way to turn them off for regular users.
Where? I don't see ads absolutely anywhere.
>they can hamstring ad blockers with things like Manifest V3
I've been hearing about this for years and it still hasn't happened. When the change occurs, if I begin seeing ads, I will abandon Chrome. But until then I will keep using it.
A small thing that annoys me: ctrl/cmd + click on bookmark doesn't behave like the same click on a web page (opening in the background). There are changes that can be made to about:config, but it's a mess, behaviour is different between a bookmark and bookmark folders, sometimes it switches you to the new tab, etc.
I've also noticed that JS performance isn't as good on some sites. For example, the hash step on VirusTotal takes way longer for larger files on Firefox than it does on Chrome.
The messy profile switch is also annoying, especially when they've supported the feature for years. And no, containers are not a replacement for profiles.
So I agree that Firefox needs to improve. The average user won't use it just because it supports the "open web"... do they even know what that means?
I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work.
I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.
The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
* Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian.
You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.
Suggesting Lynx as an alternative clarifies that your remarks are unserious, or you are out of touch with reality --- charitably I will assume the former.
I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work.
Linux is a single server OS and it's good.
IE was bad because Microsoft is bad.
For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
I'm gonna use Chrome fork or previous version. Chromium is open source
Chrome was targeted at developers from the outset. The comic explains "why Chrome" in a way that makes very little sense to a lay person but shows why Chrome is far better than what developers were developing against up until that point. Google sold Chrome on its technical merits, and technical people could easily sell it to friends and family because everyone already used Google and liked it. They had a compelling story for what was wrong with existing browsers and they had strong name recognition.
I think the problem with efforts to compete with Chrome so far is that they miss both these things. I'm a privacy fan myself, but it's pretty clear that privacy alone isn't enough of a selling point the way "a browser that works like an operating system" was. There has to be something else to set the browser apart. And then once you have that distinguishing feature to appeal to the technical crowd, you need some way to make it easy to recommend the friends and family. That's especially difficult in today's browser environment.
[0] http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html
> And to help prevent those privacy problems, the ad giant is asking advertisers to promise they won't abuse this ad targeting mechanism.
Ah, what a relief. Asking gently this to advertisers with the Do-Not-Track HTTP header has worked well, after all!
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/issues/74#...
1. malevolent advertiser creates an ad campaign for cat-food but targeted at people who are interested in bondage.
2. user who is into bondage and owns a cat sees the ad, clicks on it, orders the cat food, types their home address and personal info. Note: user is unaware of the bondage link.
3. malevolent advertiser now has another datapoint containing the bondage connection with personal info.
In reality, the topics come from a predefined taxonomy[0] that certainly won't include topics like "bondage", nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII. Additionally the system inserts noise into the system (5% of the time the topic will be a random choice rather than one of your actual inferred topics of interest), so that you can't actually infer the user's real interests from a single ad click like that.
[0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/ove...
And we all know that policies, like end user agreements, never change. They are especially never changed unilaterally by commercial entities for which the change could be beneficial to their business plans (directly, or by virtual of a lobbying party negotiating an exchange of conveniences).
Also, there's a lot you can do with innocent looking data, simply through correlations. Just like people like to generalize from skin color (I mean, what is more innocent than skin color?) I'm pretty sure that you can even infer skin color from things like "likes R&B music" and a few similar datapoints. Of course, you don't get exact information but statistics can be enough to hurt someone. That's also why your noise argument doesn't make much sense.
Nice v1 at the end. We can assume that this list is final and will not be changed?
> nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII.
Yeah, it just exposes interest in family planing, loans, ..., which we do know have absolutely no potential for abuse.
Or given the attempts to outlaw drag there is probably no potential way to use interest in Nail Care or Makeup in a negative fashion, right?
> Yes, if you assume the people who designed this API were idiots
I assume they are getting paid well to play the role.
Pointing to some stuff and saying "this API that's made to target users allows user targeting" isn't bringing anything new, really.
Let's find out.
We must cut this Gordian knot while still can. Some combination of public funding for browser development, and making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards, that will slowly get made simpler [1]. Perhaps the corporate browsers should be forced to display a scary red warning for incompatible websites, even if the browser is able to render them (like Google does if it whimsically decides a website is phishing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470078).
Just like we forbid radio jamming, polluting the web should be restricted, if we want to maintain some semblance of usability.
As for the API itself.. it is interesting how ads based on website content aren't even considered. If something as blunt and expensive as a poster next to a highway is viable, why do we let Google lie to us that only surveillance-based advertising can fund the web?
[1] Old content gets to follow the standards of when it was published.
I honestly can't think of a bigger waste of public money. It will cost billions and billions, we will get nothing useful, and then it will be abandoned.
> making web domain names (a public good) contingent on website content following web standards
I don't know what this means. Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard? What happens if it's not? Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
Well there was the War on Drugs. But yeah I don't want a browser that was made by my government. What could possibly go wrong?
Say that again when the address bar says "brought to you by Pepsi™", and every website you visit is sent to the manufacturer - like LG TVs sent filenames found on USBs back to LG.
> It will cost billions and billions
Mozilla spends $400+ million per year, and they've been at it for more than a decade. It already costs billions.
> we will get nothing useful
Even if the funding goes to Mozilla? Are Google's dollars magical?
> Are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to register a website name unless the content is in strict compliance with someone's web standard?
I'm suggesting you keep the domain, but it doesn't resolve until the content is standard-compliant. Or, alternately, for-profit corporate and publicly-funded browsers are obligated to display a scary warning.
> Do they take the domain away from me? Does the government take it?
What do you find so hard to understand? Do you think the domain namespace shouldn't be managed like a public good?
You're big on cynical criticism of my suggestions, but are my predictions wrong? How do you think the growing cost to develop a browser will be funded, if not by selling out? What do you think will happen? What has been happening so far?
> funded
The two are not the same. Regardless, you could still use any browser you wish.
Which government, though? Open source projects know no borders, they can get funding from any and every government they want.
I mean yeah probably. You know what else does that? Removing 3rd party cookies and not adding an advertisement API to replace it. Literally effortless.
I believe chrome had been a good product but at this point it is clear the policy makers are no longer people who care about it as a browser (some may argue that was always the case) and are now just execs from the adsense branch.
The option to block all 3d party cookies certainly exists (though by default only affects incognito mode).
US: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333848/google-antitrust... (States) https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-doj-cookies-privac... (DoJ)
EU (EC): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/eu-antitrust-reg...
Ok, technically only the UK explicitly forbid it. But having something be pre-emptively investigated for antitrust issues by both the US and EU even before launch is functionally the same thing.
Honestly kind of sad. The whole Google mystique is about not pretending this sort of nonsense will work.
So we’re moving from fingerprinting to fingerprinting plus more data.