Chrome Ships WebGPU

Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by illiarian on Friday April 07, 2023 @03:35AM (#35479128)

1. In the context of browsers Google's competitors are Safari and Firefox. And in this context Google is always consistently behind: either unwilling to implement the same privacy protections, or implementing them years later, or coming up with non-solutions

2. It's funny how you link to a Google propaganda piece on FLoC. Whereas Google's competitors (context: browsers) actually try to reduce fingerprinting, tracking, and thrid-party cookies, Google is trying to have the cake and eat it too with FLoC. Which was such a blatant attempt to keep fingerprinting and tracking alive that everyone immediately disabled it within months of Google's experiments with it.

Edit: Tracking and fingerprinting is Google's bread and butter, literally: 80% of its money comes from targeted advertising.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by jefftk on Friday April 07, 2023 @07:16AM (#35480422)

If you're trying to understand what Google's doing here and what their incentives are, it's important to distinguish between tracking in general and specifically using fingerprinting to track. They're very interested in showing people relevant ads based on their history, but only in ways where users have some control. With the traditional approach of third-party cookies, for example, the user can clear some or all cookies, open a private browsing window, or use extensions to limit what cookies are sent/received where. With fingerprinting, however, the user has no control: if I clear cookies I'll still have the same fingerprint, and I can't tell the web to forget me anymore. Same if I open a private browsing window, close it, and open it again. We started this thread with the question of whether Chrome adding an API that increased the fingerprinting surface benefited Google, and I've been arguing no: as shown in my quotes above Google has committed not to use fingerprinting.

Your (1) and (2) are about tracking in general and not fingerprinting. On (1), I agree that Google is behind. This is explicitly a strategy to (a) protect ads monetization and (b) avoid a situation where you turn off third party cookies only to have advertisers move to something worse (see: being anti-fingerprinting):

After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

On (2), while FLoC abandoned the successor, Topics, is still moving forward: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/ Note that unlike FLoC it only observes pages where the page calls "document.browsingTopics()". I don't see how FLoC or Topics represent trying to "have the cake and eat it too" -- they're explicitly attempts to move user interest tracking from the server to the client, to address some of the privacy issues people have with server-side tracking.

On "literally: 80% of its money comes from targeted advertising" that's wrong? The vast majority of Google's income is from ads, yes, but it's mostly from search ads, which aren't targeted.

(I used to work in this area at Google; speaking only for myself)

[ Parent | on HN ]