And Apple has suddenly shown its 1.5 billion users just how exposed Chrome’s surveillance business model has now become.ĭespite Apple versus Facebook stealing the privacy headlines, arguably it’s Google that Apple has more in its sights. The issue is that this is an impossible contortion. In the aftermath of FLoC’s awkward failure, Google is now touting a new idea to serve the needs of its customers-advertisers-while talking up privacy.

Google’s Idle Detection API is worrying enough, but there’s worse to come.

“Google has been professing their intent to figure out how to place ads in a privacy-preserving way with plans like the Privacy Sandbox,” Mozilla told me, “but those plans keep being delayed, and all the while they build functionalities like this one that tracks people and enables new ad use cases.” The utility this API provides is outweighed by the privacy concerns it introduces.” The Idle Detection API has a very narrow motivating use case but exposes new data about a user's behavior to the entire web-data that will ultimately be abused for user surveillance and advertising. Google refuted any such claims and secretly enrolled millions of users into a trial, before quietly admitting later that those warnings had come true, that it had made the risks of tracking worse.ĭuckDuckGo warns that Idle Detection “is another example of Google adding an API that has poor privacy properties to the web without consensus-and in this case in the face of active dissent-from other browser vendors. If this release of a controversial Chrome tracking technology despite industry warnings sounds familiar, that’s because we saw the same with FLoC earlier this year: Google was warned that its attempt to anonymize users while still serving the needs of advertisers was a surveillance disaster in the making. There are privacy implications that a user cannot be expected to realize.” Vivaldi agrees, telling me: “We are not happy with the privacy implications of this API (since it can be abused for behavioral tracking), or the fact that it can be abused to know about when you might not notice if something is using your CPU.

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