this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
1398 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
60116 readers
2797 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One key change in the short term is the Topics API. This is the replacement for 3rd-party cookies in Privacy Sandbox. Basically, it allows sites to query your browser directly about what topics you enjoy, and Chrome will respond with topics based on analysis of your browsing history to allow for targeted ads. If it seems strange that a new "privacy" feature is still serving up data about you for targeted ads -- it is. And in fact, a lot of the proposed changes potentially just give Google more sway to act as a middleman, which ultimately gives them more data.
Will your experience change immediately? Likely not, but as with many things in this space, it's about the dangers of the path and its longer term implications, specifically here about corporate controls and softening the definition of "privacy".
Here's a decent overview with more far more details.
I know what the Topics API does. I'm asking for a concrete example of exactly how it's going to make my internet experience worse. (That Register article doesn't provide one.)
Losing privacy makes your internet experience worse. That seems pretty clear to me, but if you don't care about corporations being better suited to target ads to you, then I don't think anyone would be able to convince you that these changes are bad.
I'd love to debate this with you properly but I've got COVID right now and don't have the energy to put together a decent response, sorry. Basically I just don't see how the specific features in the new Chrome build let advertisers do anything they can't already do. I don't see how they contribute to ads getting worse, or where "nickel and diming" comes into it.