Honest question, why is the privacy sandbox user hostile? I assume it's because Google is using it to collect your information but blocking everyone else from collecting it?
At face value they claim it's designed to eliminate tracking techniques like fingerprinting, it's actually a system explicitly designed to collect the users' private information. From the horse's mouth.
"To provide this free resource without relying on intrusive tracking, publishers and developers need privacy-preserving alternatives for their key business needs, including serving relevant content and ads."
The proposals involve reducing UA data, ip tracking, etc.
But still allows for some amount of targeting. From my understanding instead of you being an identifiable individual via fingerprinting, the aim is to make you "probably one in [large group] of technology people".
I'm not saying I think it's a good thing, but on the surface it does appear _better_.
Does Privacy sandbox prevent fingerprinting completely (for example, canvas fingerprinting, WebGL fingerprinting, audio fingerprinting)? Or the advertisers would be able to use both fingerprinting and newly provided data?
I don't understand why we need to trade here. Just block figerprinting and do not provide any alternatives for advertisers. This is the best for users.
You can't block fingerprinting completely without breaking a ton of useful features. But the sandbox has a concept called the privacy budget which tries to determine if a site is collecting too much information. It should allow sites that actually use some of these features to continue to work.
The idea is that if sites that query fonts, engage canvas, read the user agent information, etc, they are likely trying to build a fingerprint, so the browser will start to return generic data.
Presumably - hopefully - it would allow users to set their own privacy budgets. Even better if it supports granular per-site control, which may be needed for certain specialized websites.
> You can't block fingerprinting completely without breaking a ton of useful features.
Many of those features are not so useful and their main use is fingerprinting, for example:
- WebGL is mostly used for fingerprinting
- enumerating installed fonts is mostly used for fingerprinting
They should be put behind a permission popup, so that only those sites that really need them (e.g. graphic editors, text editors) can use them. So nothing gets broken.
Put WebGL, enumerating installed fonts, web audio, etc. behind a permission. In rare cases when they are really needed not for fingerprinting, the user will grant a permission and nothing gets broken.
Have you been around for the past 10-15 years of Android? Manual permissions don't solve the problem. People will just say why yes, I do indeed want to read this clickbait article/use this flashlight app, go ahead and give the server my GPS location so it can follow me around. The only reason you don't get much of this anymore is the limits the app stores enforce these days.
> I assume it's because Google is using it to collect your information but blocking everyone else from collecting it?
It isn't so much a privacy sandbox, it's an anti competition sandbox.
Google is designing standards and practices under the auspices of user privacy but in reality these changes simply lock others out of accessing data while serving it up to Google.
* Not only are they locking out competition, but they're preventing the user from stopping or mitigating collection of data as well.
I think you can have a lot of debate on it, but for me personally it can be summoned down to the following: the privacy sandbox wants to block tracking on everything that isn’t of “high user interest”. But as a user I don’t want “any” privacy intrusion.
On one hand it’s better than what’s going on now, on the other hand it’s not going to give you privacy and it’s likely going to further Google’s advertisement monopoly on much of the internet. Which is where a lot of the debate can be had, but as a user, do you really want any company to track you? If not, then you most likely don’t want control of who gets to track you in the hands of the biggest advertisement company on earth.
