I just checked it myself and at least for me all the settings are set to "Off" by default.
EDIT: Just to make it clear, it's likely I mindlessly turned these Off when first time encountering the notice by Chrome when this was first released (see the comment thread below).
>it's likely I mindlessly turned these Off when first time encountering the notice
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who does this. "Do you want to enable-" No. "Help Contoso by-" No. "Personalise your experience by-" No. "Sign up for our-" No. "Try our new-" No. "Let's get started with a brief unskippable tutorial." Sigh.
ON for me, but Chrome automatically popped up the settings page to tell me about it and let me turn it off. Still, I might have to start looking at other browsers.
This could be what happened to me and I never noticed it, so I don't want to give the impression that this is "Off" by default because it looks like it isn't.
"Topics of interest are based on your recent browsing history and are used by sites to show you personalized ads"
"Sites you visit can determine what you like and then suggest ads as you continue browsing"
Chrome collects data on everything you visit and sends that info to its "partner" sites when you visit them. IMO, in a properly regulated environment, this should result in jail time for everyone involved.
This appears to be a Chrome "field trial". I believe that you can block field trials in Chrome by blocking the domain tools.google.com. I don't even have the chrome://settings/adPrivacy page.
I believe madars meant app/process sandboxing which is different to what I think you mean with Firefox containers. Chrome is safer and has stronger sandboxing and exploit mitigations.
I turned off the Pocket recs in the settings once and never saw them again. Let FF advertise: at least they don't use app updates to quietly reset app permissions to default the way many others do.
Read the actual words that it actually says. Sites can pay Google to get a profile of you, based on your browsing history, sent to them when you visit their website. Who's keeping anything local?
So if a website, which already has way too many ways to identify you, calls document.browsingTopics() to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills, or knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that? You don't consider that spyware? That's just as bad as my browser having a back button?
>knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that?
If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Topics also have a chance to be randomly replaced. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these women clothing sites hoping that one of your future website visitors would see your ad.
>You don't consider that spyware?
The real thing you should be worried about is third party cookies. They don't have any of these privacy features that topics has and they can collect a lot more data. Both of your examples are possible with third party cookies, but not with topics. Google is trying to phase out 3rd party cookies sometime next year.
Don't worry, they'll keep the first version mild, and in a few years they'll update it with more granularity.
> The real thing you should be worried about is third party cookies. They don't have any of these privacy features that topics has and they can collect a lot more data. Both of your examples are possible with third party cookies, but not with topics. Google is trying to phase out 3rd party cookies sometime next year.
This is basically saying "we'll screw you over, but that's ok because we promise to stop screwing you over this other way". It only shows how massive their conflict of interest is.
If chrome was developed by some honest, unrelated company, they would not include this kind of spyware (because it doesn't benefit the user[1]), and also try to block 3rd party cookies.
[1] I guess they could optionally include it if users would prefer seeing more personalized ads, but it would be something opt-in that doesn't try to trick you into enabling it, like Chrome does. But realistically they wouldn't even bother to develop something like this.
