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A comment on Chrome Ships WebGPU. Parent comment

Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by foldr on Thursday April 06, 2023 @05:34AM (#35466193)
Even supposing that Google do benefit from it in that manner, there would be far simpler ways for them to make fingerprinting easier. It's extremely unlikely that this is a significant motivation for adding WebGPU. Not to mention that a lot of the fingerprinting you can potentially do with WebGPU can already be done with WebGL.
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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by illiarian on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:26AM (#35466487)
Google has many hands in many pots. It's not that they are necessarily looking for easier ways to do fingerprinting. But they sure as hell wouldn't put up a fight to make it harder.
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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by foldr on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:34AM (#35466539)
Then why does Chrome contain loads of features to make fingerprinting harder?
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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by illiarian on Thursday April 06, 2023 @08:24AM (#35467395)
Chrome has to walk a fine line between what it does for privacy and what is says it does. So you have the protection against fingerprinting and at the same time you have the FLoC fiasco
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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by foldr on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:50AM (#35468292)
The simplest explanation is that the Chrome developers genuinely want to protect privacy and also genuinely want to add features. Every browser has to make that trade off. There are plenty of fingerprinting vulnerabilities in Firefox and Safari too.

The reasoning here seems to be something like "Google is evil; X is an evil reason for doing Y; therefore Google must have done Y because of X". It's not a great argument.

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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by illiarian on Thursday April 06, 2023 @12:22PM (#35470655)
I can only quote Johnathan Nightingale, former executive of Mozilla, from his thread on how Google was sabotaging Firefox [1]:

"The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."

[1] Thread: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686

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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by foldr on Thursday April 06, 2023 @01:05PM (#35471283)
That whole Twitter thread says nothing about fingerprinting or privacy. The first comment is close to gibberish, but seems to be mostly about some kind of Google office development project in Toronto.

You are literally following the parody argument schema that I mentioned in my previous comment. You make some vague insinuations that Google is evil, then attribute everything it does to non-specific evil motivations. Even if Google is evil, this kind of reasoning is completely unconvincing.

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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by illiarian on Thursday April 06, 2023 @01:19PM (#35471483)
> That whole Twitter thread says nothing about fingerprinting or privacy.

I should've been more clear. In this case I was responding to this: "The reasoning here seems to be something like "Google is evil; X is an evil reason for doing Y; therefore Google must have done Y because of X". It's not a great argument."

> You are literally following the parody argument schema that I mentioned in my previous comment.

Because you have to look at the behaviour of the organism as a whole. If the shoe fits etc.

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