topics

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.

The browser keeps track of he top 5 categories from this list of these 629 topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before. For an epoch a site can only get at most 1 topic. The browser will return topics for up to the last 3 epochs (the site only gets data for the epochs it has called the API in)

Delete Chrome. “The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.” https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

Those are the top-level categories. Each of them has subcategories which are more granular. Not all of them are public, from what I can tell. Here's an example of some that are. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Those are only some of the top categories, the taxonomy file currently has ~600 more detailed entries and it is rapidly growing. The goal seems to be well in the thousands. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://developer.chrome.com/en/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/...

Just got this blocking modal. In mine, the title says “Turn on an ad privacy feature”. That is misleading to say the least. This is a privacy-invading feature, leaking summaries of my browsing history to anyone who wants to have a look. What’s worse, the modal completely blocks the UI, so you can’t even search for it to understand more. Why am I even using this browser anymore? EDIT: Note this section about privacy goals, from the draft proposal by two Googlers: “Users should be able to understand the API, recognize what is being communicated about them, and have clear controls. This is largely a UX responsibility but it does require that the API be designed in a way such that the UX is feasible.” [1] I guess it’s just a little oopsie that made the people responsible for the UX present it to the user through misleading copy. 1: https://gi

>to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills Those aren't topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... >knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that? If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Topics also have a chance to be randomly replaced. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these w

> You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial. And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this. As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3] Do not assume any good inten

> [0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... 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.

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. [0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... [1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topi

They're requiring advertisers to "attest" that they won't abuse the API. Clearly they're taking privacy concerns seriously /s https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/issues/74#...

As a fan of over-ambitious taxonomies I'm fascinated by this attempt to create a taxonomy covering every possible category of targeted ad: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Don't take my word for it: WordPress treated FLoC as a security concern in 2021: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-fl... A good overview of the context: https://digiday.com/media/we-cant-un-floc-ourselves-googles-... More detail: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-... When it comes to Topics, it's essential that there be hands on the wheel at W3C that approach the solidification of e.g. the Topics taxonomy https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... from a neutral perspective that takes into account the various ways in which proposed topics could be dangerous, and how strongly to word the specification to prevent it from creeping in increasingly privacy-eroding ways in the future.

>It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. Not if they perform speech speech to text on-device and send the parsed results (only a few kb). If you really want to keep things hidden you can perform all the recognition/inference on-device and only send the topic (eg. [1]), which is only a few bits of information. [1] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...