Urge Chrome users to block theme and FLEDGE APIs
The way big businesses make money on the Internet is, overall, by tracking your activity on the Web with cookies and selling ads against that information. Google is looking for something better than cookies to enable that tracking – the company just hasn’t found it. However, privacy advocates would really like to see the search giant give up. Short of that, competitor DuckDuckGo wants to empower users with its updated tracker blocker.
In its Spread Privacy blog, DuckDuckGo is urging Google Chrome users to block Google’s latest experimental tracking APIs, topics and flanges. The purpose of the former is to collect information about the sites a user visits and link certain topics to the searches they perform, then set up an ad to sell them. The latter would facilitate “remarketing” or continuous, personalized advertising campaigns. Both are derived from Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative.
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Users are asked to go to Chrome’s Settings, look for the Privacy and security section for the Privacy sandbox toggle, and then make sure they have unchecked the box for Privacy sandbox tests. Alternatively, DuckDuckGo is promoting its Chrome extension that blocks both topics and fragments.
In contrast, the company says it prevents third-party trackers on websites from using topics and other “fingerprints” to create more detailed profiles of their targets and that some potential topics may be particularly sensitive to certain users. can. DuckDuckGo is also against the concept of re-targeting ads.
Google describes the topics as a tracking method that provides enough opacity to prevent individuals from being profiled and is working with stakeholders to determine which topics are too many to include in the API. will be sensitive.
Privacy-focused groups were also against Google’s first attempt at a cookie replacement called FLOC last year over several similar concerns.
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About the Author
Jules Wang (1352 articles published)
Jules joined the Android Police team in 2019. Before that, he was in Pocketnow. He loves public transportation, podcasts, and people in general. He also likes to take ideas from the big picture in technology about how people are drawn to how it’s used in every other industry.
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