What changes are they making, and how to prevent them affecting users?
Also, does Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, or a VPN with ad-blocking and anti-tracking prevent the new data collection through Chrome?
Google is rolling out a new feature called “Privacy Sandbox” that also enables websites to use Google’s new “Topics API” to view web addresses in your browser history.
People are generally concerned because it allows a site like Petsmart.com to learn that you bank at WellsFargo.com and that you also visit Nickelodeon.com frequently. Petsmart may then use this information to target ads at you.
The larger concern is that just about any website can learn this information (so not just Petsmart.com, but SouthernRecipeMamaOfFour.net can also get this information, which is excessive access for a site like that to say the least). The fear is likely overblown, though.
What can you do to protect yourself? Don’t use Google products or Chromium-based web browsers.
Edit: Looks like my understanding was off. Shout out to NicoCharrua and a couple other users who clarified that Topics API doesn’t expose URLs, but instead looks at the URLs in your history to create topics (kind of like tags) that other sites can see. Hope my potential employer doesn’t find out about my love of large ethnic butts!
Cool comment except for this part:
The fear is likely overblown, though.
I would say, if anything, the fear is likely under-blown.
Sure, you’ll find many users here on Lemmy who hate what Google are doing… but we’re not the typical internet user. I mean, we specifically found this niche platform called Lemmy rather than use one of the mainstream social media platforms. The typical “normie” who uses Chrome probably has no idea about the privacy risks of using it (either in its current form or when the Topics API is being used). We need to help others understand, and hopefully convince these people to move over to Firefox.
enables websites to use Google’s new “Topics API” to view web addresses in your browser history
That’s just false. It generates generic topics from domain names in the history and provides some of those topics to advertisers. Nobody gets to know which domains you’ve visited. It also has measures to make it hard to build a profile on you based on the provided topics.
Any kind of tracking is bad. You don’t have to misrepresent what kind of tracking it is
Which includes the Steam client. It’s a CEF-based application.
Electron apps are largely irrelevant in this discussion, unless they include a general-purpose browser. The Steam client is exclusively used to display things from some Valve-owned API domain (or is there a general-purpose browser somewhere in there?). All the data generated by Steam is completely separate from the data generated by the normal Chrome browser.
And the same thing goes for Electron apps like Signal Desktop, Atom, VS Code, Slack, Teams, …
Theres a general browser in the in game overlay
So right now when browsing the internet if you take no steps to protect your privacy, it’s like your house is surrounded by corporate spies collecting data on everything they can see you doing through the windows. And these are some huge windows.
Taking steps like adblocking, blocking known trackers, blocking third party cookies, VPN, and / or, blocking JavaScript altogether is basically just closing / blocking those windows to make it harder for the spies. Sure, they can still glean some info but significantly less.
With Chrome’s recent change, now you’ve been opted-in to having a tracker strapped to your chest. They promise the data is less exposing than the current data being collected, but that can change They claim it’ll protect your privacy because instead of the spies collecting data directly to provide to their employers they simply have to walk up to a terminal and collect the data the chest tracker has collected and curated.
This is just my interpretation, I haven’t thoroughly researched it I simply decided it was too much and moved back to Firefox as my primary browser after using Chrome for over a decade.
