alt Hacker NewsI still don't understand why the highest entropy APIs aren't gated behind browser consent.
A news site doesn't need to do audio processing on my machine and read back the buffer? It doesn't need to use webgl to render triangles to an offscreen buffer?
Broad geographical targeting shouldn't be an issue. In fact, it's so easy that I think we should invent an ad-targeting API people can opt in to. If I could tell advertisers my geographic location, gender, age cohort, languages, and 3 interests, I'd not feel that's an invasion of privacy when they use that to deliver ads. I'd just get lawnmower ads instead of shampoo ads and that's fine.
The problem is, they don't want to use that kind of targeting. They want to target me with ads for a travel destination that my coworker mentioned in a Messenger message to another coworker five minutes ago. But we should just not accept that.
Replies
> "I still don't understand why the highest entropy APIs aren't gated behind browser consent"
Because it's known that interrupting the user-intent with a unrelated consent-popup doesn't help.
Older people may remember that this was the approach of Java J2ME, where you couldn't provide a fluent user-experience as the user first had to answer huge popups about individual API-permissions with "Always Allow", "Allow now" etc.
> A news site doesn't need to do audio processing on my machine and read back the buffer? It doesn't need to use webgl to render triangles to an offscreen buffer?
We should go further. A web-site with mostly static content should not use user-side scripting (Javascript) at all, it's unnecessary for it. It should be required only in rare cases where a site is basically an application and require manually turning it on each time such application is opened.
Well yeah, but there's also the part where I'm not okay loading ads from a third party because they eat my battery, add latency, and can potentially be used to spread malware. So there's the conflicting preferences regarding targeting that you mention but also conflicting preferences regarding how they are served.
> I still don't understand why the highest entropy APIs aren't gated behind browser consent.
Simple answer: The makers of 3 largest browsers by market share (collectively 90%+) are buddies with the people who want to fingerprint you. Only the 4th largest gives a shit.
That would be nice. However, It’s easy to see why it’s way more than simply what they want, they don’t really have a preference but it boils down to money. You’ll only replace your lawnmower every couple years and the rest of the time they’re guessing what you may buy next. By spying on your daily conversations and browsing, they have an idea of what you are likely to buy this week, next week, and the week after. This is so much more valuable to an advertiser.
> I still don't understand why the highest entropy APIs aren't gated behind browser consent.
Last I checked it's because it was generally considered that preventing fingerprinting is practically impossible anyway. It's not like you need a lot of entropy for fingerprinting, and the web API surface is enormous. To actually stop fingerprinting you'd need to make your web browser more or less useless.
That might sound good, but people already moan and groan about cookie notices. Imagine if each website that legitimately needs it would start asking for permission to each fingerprintable API. Although I do think we should have that option, just not as a default.
Same reasons why browsers allow javascript on every site.
The most used browser comes from the same company that runs the largest ad network.
It's the browser that introduced many of these APIs in the first place.
That should answer the question.
(If you ask me if a browser should report how many cores the machine has, including physical and logical ones, I would answer never, every time. But not everyone thinks that way. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/h...)