this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Please, everyone, stop using Chrome. This is an easy vote with your wallet that doesn't even require your wallet.
Complacency means the internet gets worse, ads get worse, nickel and diming gets worse. It's the easiest chance to take a stand you'll ever have.
I'm fairly confident no one here is using Chrome.
I use it at work because of it has the best dev tools. Although edge is pretty much the same so I could use that, but not much of an ethical upgrade.
Every Chromium fork has those same tools.
I know that. I acknowledged that in the next sentence when I talked about edge.
But it still wouldn't stop me from using chrome because I need to test with it. It's what most of our end users use. I'm not about to install Vivaldi or something when we don't even support it, and none of our users use it.
Okay so I'm just not sure what your point is then.
I am ...
Serious question: let's say I continue using Chrome and Privacy Sandbox becomes the norm. How does my internet experience get worse?
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.