this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Google's new ad system is called Topics. If you want to understand how it works, I would like to point you to Security Now Ep 935 in which Steve Gibson gives a pretty thorough analysis.
Marcus' take in the image is overly simplistic and a bit FUD. The intention is for Topics to replace current ad tracking systems such as tracking pixels and other metrics. In conjunction with implementing Topics, Google is removing third-party cookies from Chrome, which will eliminate most of the current invasive tracking tools.
I'm not really a Google fanboy and I'll probably just stick with Firefox personally, but everything about Topics sounds less privacy invasive than the way things are done now. If Google can force this change on the internet advertising market it will actually be an improvement for user privacy.
It's not overly simplistic. It's simply not a privacy feature if the core functionality is sharing your data. Privacy is if they stopped sharing data. Sharing more data is antithetical to privacy.
Yes but this is local to your browser and you’ll be able to edit and/or clear it out if you choose.
It’s not perfect, and I’m aware of which community this is, but this is vastly better than 3rd party cookies.
You say that as if clearing out cookies isn't also a thing one can do. All they're doing is opting you into more directly handing them your data. And I didn't see any mention that cookies will be discontinued by them anyway.
In the end, the big problem here is that it's being routed as a privacy feature when it's anything but. It's just a different kind of privacy violation.
It's simply not about privacy so it shouldn't be labeled as such.