Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefox/Safari)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API/Using

by kreyenborgi • 2 years ago

97 58 2 years ago

developer.mozilla.org

Are there extensions that disable this?

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Oh look, an easy new way to fingerprint users.

politelemon• 2 years ago

Infer topics of interest from the site URL

Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results for most sites?

mattnewton2• 2 years ago

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" ?

rerdavies• 2 years ago

... using an AI that's been trained on browsing history captured from billions of users. Pretty sure that's what "infer" means.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Yet another step into ChromeOSissification of the Web.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Break up Google fast. We need tech to return to the true hacker spirit.

yndoendo• 2 years ago

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?

userbinator5• 2 years ago

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 )

pdpi2• 2 years ago

The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to...

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?

userbinator5• 2 years ago

I don't care how something works if I'm against the purpose. The same "but we should have a technical argument" BS was used by proponents of WEI, and thankfully most people saw through it.

No means no. DO NOT WANT. End of argument.

josh-at-banxa• 2 years ago

Understanding how something works is the first step in circumventing it.

Dylan168073• 2 years ago

The irony of telling people how to use something you're opposed to...

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".

userbinator5• 2 years ago

It's Mozilla's documentation site. Firefox doesn't have the API. It has no obligation to even mention its existence. The only thing that documentation is doing is helping Chrome.

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.

JimDabell2• 2 years ago

It's a documentation site. You want it to pretend the API doesn't exist, or what?

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.

josefx• 2 years ago

Mozilla started working on a similar API with Facebook back when Google announced FLOC. They are most likely more opposed to the bad press FLOC got than they are to the idea itself.

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

from iab context taxonomy

treve• 2 years ago

I thought the removal of 3rd party cookies was also reversed.

afavour3• 2 years ago

Narrator: Google was, in fact, not getting rid of third party cookies

luckydata• 2 years ago

Note the plan was abandoned to satiate UK regulators, not a decision made unilaterally by Google

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

Now you made me want to play The Stanley Parable again...

threeseed2• 2 years ago

Getting rid of third party cookies will not be an issue for advertisers.

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.

remus• 2 years ago

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.

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.

realusername• 2 years ago

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.

That honestly sounds like circumvention of unauthorized access. That's just breaking software protections.

wombarly• 2 years ago

Websites are moving towards providing md5/sha1/sha256 hashes of your normalized email (stripping the + from gmail) or phone number to advertisers.

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.

wpm• 2 years ago

I seriously do not understand why people use Google Chrome and other Chromium derivatives.

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".

throw-the-towel• 2 years ago

Firefox has browsing sync, maybe it's not as seamless as Chrome's, but it's there.

nsonha• 2 years ago

the answer is simple, they don't care that much about privacy, despite claiming so.

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.

btown• 2 years ago

This was going to be the compromise that would allow Chrome to have a path towards deprecating third-party cookies without massively decreasing its ad revenue, but they've walked away even from that: https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/

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

threeseed2• 2 years ago

If ever there was an antitrust situation it is Google and Chromium.

(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.

surajrmal• 2 years ago

To be clear, it's actually everyone else that benefits from this sort of API. Regulators (eg CMA) are the ones stopping Google from removing third party cookie support from Chrome without a suitable replacement. The world is more complex than what you can see at a glance.

sbrother• 2 years ago

How is this different from FLoC? My understanding was that Google came out with FLoC to solve this problem, but then scrapped it when it became clear that no one wanted it except Google.

hansvm• 2 years ago

Hypothetically, what could the modern web look like if instead of inferring user attributes we let users specify those?

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.

Using the Topics API (Chrome Only, Opposed by Firefox/Safari)

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