this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
264 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37735 readers
47 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People aren't misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they're doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world's largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.
I don’t disagree as such, and I won’t use Chrome, but objectively it is better than what we had in Chrome. While many of us refuse/block ads/tracking completely, many users will now have better privacy with ads that are not micro-targeted on their individual but more broadly targeted with a generalised interest area that varies per visit and adjusts over time to keep it relevant.
IF a user doesn’t disable ads completely, this seems a decent way to make the ads somewhat relevant to the user without the horrible tracking methods in use today. Objectively that’s a better state than seeing ads for something completely irrelevant to the user. Again, this is not relevant for most of us in here, and I sincerely hope most of us don’t use a Chrome-based browser to begin with, but for the average internet user, for whom this is designed, I’d argue it’s a net positive.