this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2021
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Privacy

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Cookies are soon to be a thing of the past; Google wants to play in the Sandbox instead. It might sound rather twee, but this marks a seismic shift in the online ecosystem that will affect us all.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Between the light gray text and meandering presentation that was physically and mentally difficult to read but what I got from it is:

Google doesn’t need actual cookies anymore, fingerprinting is it. They have a huge advantage on those who do. Moreover they will offer a recapcha-like web api that others can use with a privacy budget to determine approximately who the user is.

Is that about it?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Oh god please no, I hate having to deal with recaptcha enough already (and that's just the visible recaptcha version), I really don't want to worry/deal with another variant as well.

Each call to an API will reveal more about a user. “Websites can call APIs until those calls have revealed enough information to narrow a user down to a group sufficiently large enough to maintain anonymity”, said Schuh. Any further attempts will be blocked, however.

I'd be interested in how that is decided, and how those calls are shared beyond the first call.

Also this bit was fun:

But Rhodes said there were some good things to come from the proposal. He said “cross-device tracking” of users should be easier through a browser-based solution, “because if you’re in Chrome you’ll be signed in to Chrome across all your devices I would assume.

“So if you watch an ad on Youtube, click through on your phone, and then buy that holiday later on your desktop, at the moment it’s actually quite tricky for us to know that that [ad] has had any impact, or have data which suggests that’s had an impact, whereas with browser-based tracking you can at least do that.”

He added: “It should be easier to track what people do, so from Google’s perspective it’s easier for them to have a better understanding of who you are, which ultimately leads to a better ability to buy advertising. But all of that’s wrapped up in the fact that it’s provided by Google.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

if you’re in Chrome you’ll be signed in to Chrome across all your devices I would assume.

wouldn’t it be convenient if Google doesn’t fund mozilla in 2022 and the only safe browsers left are Chrome and Safari.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

There is always ungoogled-chromium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Agreed, hopefully there will continue to be alternatives, but whether they pass the cookie-replacing fingerprint api test is another matter.