Chrome's 'Topics' Advertising System Is Here, Whether You Want It Or Not (arstechnica.com) 86
slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of internet usage, especially given this system's eye-rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly.
The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.
With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."
The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.
With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."
Chroned (Score:2)
Still wrong (Score:2)
They got to shift to just the topic of interest at that instant only. No history what so ever. In other words, *any* tracking API is wrong.
Contextual ads pay less (Score:2)
Google tried "just the topic of interest at that instant only"; the initial version of AdSense was contextual. It turned out that advertisers weren't willing to pay nearly as much for ad placements targeted at the immediate context of an individual HTML document as they are for that ad placements that target an individual viewer's interests over the longer term.
I'm interested in ideas to replace advertising that don't involve putting every domain behind a separate subscription.
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It sounds as if you only want Internet resources operated as a hobby, such as those that existed prior to its commercialization in the 1990s, to continue to exist. Do I understand you correctly? And if so, if all commercial Internet resources were to disappear tomorrow, would most Internet users still feel a need to subscribe to home Internet access from an ISP?
And? (Score:2)
Sounds like music to my ears. Online ads are stupidly cash rich, time they went down a notch or ten.
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no matter what the final solution may ultimately be.
And they have to stop with this goal of looking for a final solution.
Dev Null to the rescue (Score:2)
Huge hole opening in the browser world (Score:2)
But wait! Can't we do that by taking just the browser engine and giving it a slim front-end with a few quality of life extensions included? That w
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Brave is certainly giving it a go.
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Yep, all it needs is a way to disable its endless push for crypto.
Re: Huge hole opening in the browser world (Score:2)
I find Vivaldi is giving the best go of any of the alternative Chrome based builds.
You know they're all open source right? (Score:2)
Frankly with all the other things in the world to worry about having some advertiser knowing what my preferred flavor of potato chip is is the least of my worries. I mean we literally have multi-billionaires buying up all the single family homes and apartment blocks and forcing us all into indentured servitude. But this is the s*** we're worried about? Priori
Re:You know they're all open source right? (Score:4, Interesting)
But this is the s*** we're worried about? Priorities people. Priorities.
Well first off, last I checked this wasn't a site about housing markets. *eyerolling ensues* It, at least professes, to be a technology website. I know politics and literally everything that isn't tech has slowly crawled onto this site. But I think you're ranking this much higher that anyone else would about this tech topic on a tech website. I mean if you want to complain about housing, so be it. But I think Reddit would better serve you, just saying.
That said.
You can literally just compile them without the advertisement stuff
Yes, but you cannot compile Chrome without the ad stuff. Chrome is a closed source project that is built on top of the open source Chromium project. You can have Chromium without the ads, you can Brave without the ads, you can have Edge without the ads, but you can never have Chrome without the ads. And that may seem, insignificant to any of us here. We understand the difference, we might be able to tell our PHB at work to swap to Edge or something else. But for many, they're head deep into Google's services like Workspace. Google doesn't support tickets on browsers not Chrome and if your company is paying for that support, you don't have a choice anymore. Or some people don't know there are others. Or some people don't care that their are others. And so on, the reasons are varied and an exhaustive list of all of them is beside the point. The point being, for one reason or another, "just use some other project" isn't an option to some. And just tossing up this kind of excuse of "just use something else" really boils down to hand waving away an actual problem. And that hand waving is what gives tech giants the required wiggle room to enact the very things we eventually start complaining about years after the fact. We bemoan actual abuse by corporate giants but we tend to fail in being proactive in preventing it from happening over and over and over. And then when there is actual abuse, we all stand around looking at each other either saying "I told you so" or "How did we let it get this far?"
I get that we on our own little PCs have the luxury of just jumping ship whenever we feel like it. But our situation is the exception to the norm. And it is important to keep that perspective in mind.
There's several projects that do just that and binaries are readily available
Yes, you are correct. But they are not Chrome. And until the dominance of Chrome is toppled, those other projects aren't really meaningful. Across all device types (last I checked somewhere near end of 2021) Chrome is two out of every three browser request on this planet. Not Chromium, not Brave, not Edge, nor anything else. Chrome. So yes those other projects do exist, but they exist as such that if they did not exist there would be little to no one who noticed.
Frankly with all the other things in the world to worry about having some advertiser knowing what my preferred flavor of potato chip is is the least of my worries
And that's fine, everyone is free to value their personal preferences differently. Chrome however, takes my ability to rank the value of my preferences away from me. Google has determined exactly what the value of those preferences are and give people no say on adjustment to that value. It's one thing to say, "yeah what potato chip I like means really nothing to me in the long run." It is another thing entirely to have no say if those potato chips mean anything to you. With Chrome, it doesn't matter if you value it or not. That was never an option to voice with Chrome. So indicating that you do or don't care is beside the point, you were never given an option to indicate that it is important or not in the first place with Chrome. Your opinion is meaningless because you are never given an option to where your opinion of things impacts Chrome.
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Frankly with all the other things in the world to worry about having some advertiser knowing what my preferred flavor of potato chip is is the least of my worries.
I mean we literally have multi-billionaires buying up all the single family homes and apartment blocks and forcing us all into indentured servitude. But this is the s*** we're worried about? Priorities people. Priorities.
Don't people ever get tired of whataboutism? Life isn't a single threaded sequentially executed computer program. It's possible to "worry" about a wide range of things all at once.
The entire point of industrial scale mass cyber stalking is to further aggregate wealth into the hands of the few making sure the rich get richer while everyone else gets as little value for their dollar as possible.
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There's a serious niche to fill out there with a browser that doesn't get in the way of browsing, at this point it feels like it would be as revolutionary as tabbed browsing was. A browser that isn't selling you on something. A browser that isn't reliant on third party extensions to be a comfortable browsing experience, that isn't trying to be a platform for apps.
But wait! Can't we do that by taking just the browser engine and giving it a slim front-end with a few quality of life extensions included? That was a strength of having many open source browsers!
They'll just include these features in the engine cores like Google is doing here...It will become more work to disable them than it is to build the front-ends.
I vote that we try to convince Apple to restart Safari for Windows, and add Linux support this time!
Stop being Evil (Score:2)
Meanwhile... Try Waterfox, or Opera, or DuckDuckG (Score:2)
Literally anything except Chrome. Except Safari, because fuck Apple.
Can you build base Chromium from source without Google's evil bullshit anymore? Is that still an option? I don't even want it, I'm just curious.
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It would be nice if web developers would stop sucking Google's teat and actually support some alternative browsers. I'm sick of visiting web sites only to see a completely blank page, or being told my browser is "out of date", because modern designers think standards compliance and graceful degradation are passé.
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I use Firefox almost exclusively and I've never seen a message telling me that my browser is out of date or a completely blank page.
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Try visiting the Lowe's Canada website. I visited their site just this week. I performed a search and got an almost completely white page in Firefox. All I saw was a "Feedback" tab on the right.
The same search worked in Chrome.
So, it does happen on occasion, hence why I keep alternative browsers on hand. For the most part, though, Firefox is a superior experience for me, and has been for many years.
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I also use Firefox pretty much 100% exclusively, and I frequently get a nice white blank page.. I've come to the conclusion that this is telling me I don't need to see what the page contains. Fortuanately, websites that are critically important to me don't do this.. so far.. knock on wood...
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Do you have an URL for one of these sites? I haven't seen one yet, but here you are, already tired of them. I would like to become tired of using Firefox, but it keeps failing to happen.
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What's even worse, is non-technical people who are on the other end of supporting whatever department business invariably ask, "But did you try it in CHROME?!?!!" if you complain about their shit website.
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It's easier to find a specialty browser that started with the Chromium code and added/removed the features to get close to what you are looking for. You already mentioned DuckDuckGo and Opera, but you can also look at Brave, Vivaldi, Blisk, Colibri, Epic, Iron, and more.
Chromium Based Browsers [zdnet.com]
if you download browser google don't care (Score:2)
Not surprised at all (Score:2)
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Ironically, because it seems to be the most effective one for blocking ads on that advertising company's video streaming site. For everthing else there's not-Chrome.
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Most effective? I've never seen any adblocker on any browser that didn't stop YouTube ads.
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The problem isn't stopping the ads, it's rendering the video. Reading H.264 streams in console output from curl gives me a headache.
Be Evil (Score:3)
Glad they dropped the "Don't"
Re:Be Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
I was involved with the design review of FLoC that ultimately lead to it being killed off, and Topics being created.
FLoC was fundamentally flawed because it could be abused to gather more information about the target than was intended, and because it lacked sufficient safeguards to protect people's privacy (e.g. their sexual orientation could be inferred, or that a Muslim enjoyed eating pork).
Topics has fixed most of it, and the few remaining issues can be worked around by browser developers and with add-ons. Also, you can completely turn it off.
Overall I think Topics is a good thing, as long as Google follows through with heavily restricting cookies and other methods of tracking. They have to offer an alternative to avoid anti-trust issues, and this alternative does a decent job of protecting the user's privacy.
Most importantly it means that people who want even more privacy than Topics offers will have an easier time of it. Right now privacy enhancements break a lot of websites, but if Chrome and other major browsers make them the default behaviour then sites will have to fix themselves.
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Most importantly it means that people who want even more privacy than Topics offers will have an easier time of it.
Even MORE privacy than being tracked constantly? How could such a thing be possible?
Re:Be Evil (Score:4, Informative)
Well that's the point of Topics, you aren't being tracked at all. Everything is local. It actively prevents companies from tracking you.
Re: Be Evil (Score:2)
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The problem is you can't easily tie the topics to an identity, unless your website happens to use logins in which case it's no worse than what we have now.
In other words unless the user voluntarily creates an account, you can't observe changes over time.
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I don't see how it accomplishes anything of the sort. Google still ultimately knows which ads the serve you. If the topics are allowed to be granular enough - user-agent + ip + some set of ads recently served; is going to unique you based on some set of intersection of topics.
In the same way bluetooth TPMS sensor data can uniquely id a car if there are handful of other constraints like its a limited access highway.
Re:Be Evil (Score:4, Informative)
It's designed not to be granular enough. As I say, they get one of five possible topics and a random one, and the topics change every week. It always uses the domain of the top level frame too, so 3rd party embedded stuff doesn't get a different topic.
Google is also changing the user-agent to stop it being used for fingerprinting: https://developer.chrome.com/d... [chrome.com]
Okay, so let's say some company has a large number of websites under its control, it is possible that they could identify an individual with some level of certainty based on collecting all 5+N of their topics and IP address and maybe some other fingerprinting stuff. And maybe they could tie that to a real identity if the user happens to have an account on one of those sites. But that's a hell of a lot of work for a low quality identifier that requires the user to visit several of the company's sites, and lasts a maximum of a week. All to deliver slightly better targeted ads than the topics they get with zero effort offer.
It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have, and nobody is stopping you from adding your own additional protections.
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Well that's the point of Topics, you aren't being tracked at all. Everything is local. It actively prevents companies from tracking you.
If that was the case Google wouldn't do it, so therefore they have a way to exploit it. I don't know where, but I absolutely do know they've got a back door to the info somewhere.
Never buy a lock from a professional burglar; he has a master key somewhere no matter what he tells you in the brochure.
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If you are that paranoid which browser do you use? Seems to me like they are all commercial with ulterior motives, or open source and subject to the whims of developers who might device to protest what your country is doing one day.
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If you are that paranoid which browser do you use?
You're saying that thing a decades-long serial privacy abuser is probably still abusing privacy is "that paranoid"? You need to get a sense of proportion.
Seems to me like they are all commercial with ulterior motives,
Whataboutism.
or open source and subject to the whims of developers who might device to protest what your country is doing one day.
I'm not aware of any open-source developer who is able to reach out into millions of websites via their "analytics" code and collate my activity in order to protest against* what my county is doing. Nor do I view protesting against an illegal war as being morally equivalent to the sort of mass surveillance which Google engages in for its own p
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Well I keep asking for evidence that Chrome is spying on users and invading their privacy, but I never get any. Shame because the UK could use a few quid right now.
As for Google Analytics, it's the same thing. No evidence of it being abused, and in fact a great deal of motivation not to abuse it. In GDPR countries abuse would be illegal too. Google would also be required to divulge the information in response to a Data Subject Access Request.
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As for Google Analytics, it's the same thing. No evidence of it being abused, and in fact a great deal of motivation not to abuse it.
What matters is taking data that does not belong to you and is none of your business in the first place. What you've done with the data you've stolen nobody has any meaningful way of knowing.
I sure as heck have zero insights into what goes on within Google and what they are doing with anyone's data. Do you? Is there any transparency into the operation? Is there any way of third parties to reason with any confidence about what goes on other than assertions made by Google itself?
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Well that's the point of Topics, you aren't being tracked at all. Everything is local. It actively prevents companies from tracking you.
If it's local, what is it even for?
Somebody's lying.
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If Google cares about our privacy, then they will give us a way to completely opt out of this. If there is no way to do so, or it only pretends to opt us out, then Google's real stance on our individual privacy is made clear. Based on the summary, it's opt-out in the current testing phase. If you want to opt-out later, it will mean constantly making sure what your browser is trying to send to Google is cleared out regularly. So... Google doesn't care about our privacy is what I'm getting out of that. No
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They already said you will be able to turn it off in Chrome, and it's optional for all other browsers.
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There's a simpler solution to all of this, which will save everyone from all of the effort of having to deal with each new proposal from the Chrome team to figure out in what way the latest proposal is bad:
Separate Chrome from Google.
It should have been obvious from the moment Chrome was announced, that the only reason Google would have to build its own browser is to be able to track absolutely every activity you perform on the web. And as long as Chrome is a Google product, it will always have to try and f
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Most of the tracking is done through cookies, and now Google is looking to heavily restrict them... And the obvious reason for making a browser is that at the time browsers had poor performance and security. When the web is your platform and you want to build complex apps on it, having a browser with poor speed and security isn't ideal.
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Infested sites won't fix themselves. They'll find a way to become "Topics".
I am less concerned about being tracked (sufficiently handled by a good HOSTS and ad blocking) than about having my limited time and resources wasted by crap I'm not interested in. I absolutely do not want to be presented with someone else's idea of what interests me. (It never does.) I consider this sort of thing breakage, not a feature. If I can make it go away, fine. If I can't, there are other browsers.
Good move. (Score:2)
As it is now, the only thing I use Chrome for is to enter my hours into my employer's payroll system (which only works w/ Chrome). I now have even less incentive to fire up that browser.
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Have you tried using Edge to get into the payroll system? Many websites that require Chrome features work OK with Edge.
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Soon...
"Hey, it looks like you are interested in payroll systems! Do you wish to buy a subscription to SuperPayroll payroll system software?"
Chrome is dead to me (Score:2)
In the pre-COVID world, I had to use Chrome as one of my browsers "because work". I've happily moved on from that company, so Chrome is now also history, though I use a privacy-friendly variant called Epic.
I couldn't help but notice this in the summary: "Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users." Translating that into RealSpeak, I get "Once we've lubricated the hockey stick, we'll expect more of you t
Drop? (Score:2)
the most recent drop of Canary
Software updates have always been "released", not "dropped". Software updates are not the latest celebrity-endorsed sneakers. Get off my lawn.
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They tried poisoning the canary with carbon monoxide but it didn't work, so now they're seeing how far it can fall down the mineshaft before it dies.
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Yes but it's not the point. The point is, with Chrome's new version we are doing Google's datamining ourselves. How much the performance is affected, is irrelevant. I don't want my browser to do something like that.
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Re:This shouldn't affect performance much (Score:5, Informative)
That's not how Topics works.
When you visit a site that uses Topics, the site gets one topic that you are interested in. The list of topics is maintained by Google and the IAB, and you can browse it here: https://github.com/jkarlin/top... [github.com]
The browser randomly selects between one of the top 5 topics you are interested in, or 5% of the time a completely random one. It is done per domain and once a topic has been revealed to a domain it won't change for one week.
In order to get a topic, the site must also offer a topic that describes its content. Sites which do not offer topics are not considered at all by the browser. The browser keeps all data locally, nothing is sent to Google. Chrome will offer a switch to turn Topics off, or it can be trivially blocked by an add-on like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger.
If the browser doesn't have enough information to offer topics, or if the user is in Private Browsing mode, no topic will be shared with the site. Users who disable or block the API will be indistinguishable from those with recent installs, who cleared browser data or who are in Private Browsing mode. This is very important for users of ad blockers and privacy enhancers, because the behaviour of those things is no longer distinguishable from non-users.
Eventually, Google will severely restrict the use of cookies. They have already begun doing this, with some cookies being automatically deleted before they expire, and restrictions on 3rd party cookie use. The Topics API is the alternative, eventually cookies will only be usable for things like staying logged in.
This seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Targeted advertising is possible, but the ability of sites to track users is severely restricted. It's not perfect, it can't be because e.g. there is no simple way to hide your IP address from the site you are visiting, and logging into sites necessarily identifies the user. It's far better than what we have though, and unlike FLoC uses a curated list of topics that avoid most of the pitfalls from that system. Most importantly, if you want to block it, doing so is trivial and won't break sites.
Re: This shouldn't affect performance much (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems reasonable, and a lot more compliant with the GDPR than the current way of working. It will depend on how much control you get over the topics, though, but in the main I think this is a step forward.
Even Google will understand that you can't continue on the current course of you want to continue doing business in Europe.
Re: This shouldn't affect performance much (Score:4, Informative)
You get no control over the topics, the browser picks them from the list based on your browsing over the last week. Well, you can turn them off entirely.
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Eventually, Google will severely restrict the use of cookies. They have already begun doing this, with some cookies being automatically deleted before they expire, and restrictions on 3rd party cookie use.
That one needs a little more explanation.
Unless someone changed HTML from a Stateless design, won't people get just a little bit pissed when their Shopping Cart "empties itself" with 3 Items already in it, or Slashdot keeps forgetting every 10 minutes that you are Logged-In?
Cookies are indeed abused for Tracking purposes; but, unfortunately, there isn't a good, universally-supported way to give websites even a simple, "short-term memory", is there?
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Google proposes:
- Disable 3rd party cookies. Only the domain of the top level frame will be able to use cookies.
- Ignore the expiry date on cookies and remove them if the user does not visit the site for some time.
I already do both of those, and sites work fine. In fact I'm even more aggressive, I whitelist sites that don't have their cookies deleted 60 seconds after I navigate away. Logins and shopping carts still work.
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Actually it would be nice to have that information for the benefit of the user - a way to do topic detection while browsing. It could be used to reject any kind of content we don't want to see (act like AdBlock), but it would learn quickly with a few examples and be customisable per user.
The problem is not the ML model for topic detection, but who's benefiting from it.
What next? (Score:2)
mozilla.org/firefox (Score:2)
I know we hate ads... (Score:3)
Before you say "just make static ads", I was on the Internet back when that was the norm, and that was the reason people blocked those ads "it's not like I'm going to buy {{non-targeted product}}"
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That's the status quo. I don't understand why the fraudsters aren't satisfied with it. Why are they constantly looking for ways to show ads to the people who won't buy?
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But what is the alternative? Every site behind a paywall? Occasional calls for funding a la Wikipedia? Sites only owned by the rich that can afford to bleed money to push their agenda?
Before you say "just make static ads", I was on the Internet back when that was the norm, and that was the reason people blocked those ads "it's not like I'm going to buy {{non-targeted product}}"
Well, that's hard luck then. I don't care if 90% of websites go bust. I don't really care if every website that I use which depends on adverts goes bust. I lived without them before and I can live without them again. I don't owe them squat because the vast majority of them just publish stuff their users wrote and those users would still write stuff if we all went back to usenet and 5MB downloads of CSS to read a three line post from 10 years ago became a distant and fading nightmare.
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Well, that's hard luck then. I don't care if 90% of websites go bust.
What is the other 10% doing?
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Porn
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The ads are fine. The tracking is not.
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The alternative is to target the advertising using the one piece of information everybody knows and expects they have: what website you are looking at. This is how radio and tv and virtually all other advertisements work.
Since when did you want any form of advertisement? (Score:1)