The Register article on the topics api last year https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/27/google_tweaks_topics_...
Well we're getting rid of 3rd party cookies... so like, that was the absolute minimum bar.
It's a curious list of topics: https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
Does anyone know how the taxonomy was created.
It's clear that mainstream browsers have become the exact opposite of user agents. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution to that problem beyond educating web developers and users, to change course to avoid all this hostile complexity, and possibly creating more alternative browsers that explicitly don't support things like this (or will lie about it to preserve the interests of the user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36935843 )
E.g.; I tend to want recipes by French authors. I have a profile set up in my browser to search in French, prefer French results, and when localization is applicable to retrieve results written in France. Switching to this profile is a button-click and automagically affects what all websites I visit believe out my personna.
E.g.; In that same example, even ad-tech presumably benefits from believing my ruse. If I'm in a mood to read French recipes in French, an ad for a US Football game is probably not going to land very well. Perhaps some company could do better by targeting based on both who I am and who I'm purporting to be (especially with respect to important life characteristics like log10(salary) and count(children)), but the temporary personna is by itself likely already better than any inferred characteristics at guiding targeted ads.
E.g.; I throw on a DIY personna. Instead of being inundated with (mostly fake) repair services when I ask for bike or device repair information, I find links to solid content like Sheldon Brown's blog and commercial links to informational content, DIY-focused parts and tools for sale, .... The web can still be a for-profit, sanitized entity while providing a vastly better experience for me the searcher and also the poor sucker paying for "bike repair shop" ads on my searches which could never possibly convert for that concept.
Isn't this just naive and may not actually produce useful results for most sites?
It's one thing that my non-tech sphere friends do, but I see so many people at work just defaulting to using Google Chrome, and I frankly just cannot fathom it.
Like, FFS, is browser sync that useful? In 30+ years using the web on a bunch of different computers, I have not once ever been like "ooooh I wish I had the 35+ tabs I had open on my work computer on my personal one".
> Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out... We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586
There are numerous ways that the Topics API could leak sensitive information (say, for instance, increased values for a set of topics statistically related to life events with legal/health consequences) - I'm glad that opposition is being highlighted.
Apple's opposition comments are also worth reviewing: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/111