This is basically an ad hominem argument. There is no room to discuss Sandbox on its merits with this stance. Yet we're debating this on an article whose every Sandbox criticism comes from other industry professionals who are just as worthy of being considered a malicious adversary.

I make no statement that Project Sandbox should not be scrutinized -- merely that it's better than third party cookies -- and I don't believe increased antitrust scrutiny of Google will lead to better user privacy.

> This is basically an ad hominem argument. There is no room to discuss Sandbox on its merits with this stance.

I respectfully disagree and defend the position you're replying to. I take issue with your provocation because I fear that asserting too much focus on a still-frame snapshot without looking at the full motion, that seems misguided. Politics constitute the motion around any spec snapshot.

Focussing only on the technical merit of the proposal without also prioritizing the living, moving context around it, that's advocating a sort of blindness imho

The solution isn't to (a) ignore the technical proposal and ignore the context, or (b) to ignore the context, and only focus on the technical proposal.

The problem is that nobody is bringing these two together. Don't just focus on context without reading the actual proposal. Your comment says nothing about the technical proposal.

You're ignoring the living, moving context that is the adtech industry. It's one with a much higher ratio of middlemen:customers than needed, representatives of whom appear in this article.

And, worth noting, the set of adtech industry persons includes all employees and contractors of Google. Google simple wouldn't exist if it weren't for adtech, and all cheques written by Google are dependent on adtech.

It's the largest, most invasive and pervasive privacy intrusion in history, and its beneficiaries includes many HN regulars.

I think I agree with you. I wholly support clamping down on adtech btw. I just don't support the "this article doesn't talk about the tech merit" angle of critique, as if that's so obviously a starting (or priority) point of departure.

If the API cannot stand on its own merits without trusting Google then it is subject to concerns about Google's trustworthiness.

3rd party cookies should be replaced with _nothing_, not this "privacy" API.

No one is saying you shouldn't be sceptical. What OP is saying is only that you should not form an opinion on the subject based off of what some pro-third-party-cookies advertising-people are saying. He is pointing out that this is clearly an attack from someone with a lot to loose, not saying "trust google".

They aren't wrong when they point out that it gives a massive information advantage to Google; but the pro-privacy solution is neither 3rd party cookies nor the "privacy" API. Both provide a means by which to uniquely identify and track the behaviour of a person.

Besides, it's not wrong to listen to the losers; you might learn about some unfair competition.