mcc

andi

@mcc

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mcc
@mcc

Help me understand how to block "Topics" on my website

Google is now rolling out some new fucking bullshit you have to opt out of or the browser spies on you:

"Topics" are like third party cookies on steroids. Normally ad networks use cookies to track you, but browsers now let you block "third party" cookies, and that makes snooping hard. So Google added a feature where, as far as I understand this, the web browser just snoops on you automatically and spontaneously volunteers tracking information to websites. Google is presenting this as a "privacy" feature when it is clearly the opposite.

Anyway, this raises a question: What do I have to do to make sure my website doesn't participate in Topics?

Okay. Cohost, you're all webdevs. What is this? Is it documented somewhere? My website has an iframe embed of youtube-nocookie. What do I do to prevent the youtube-nocookie iframe from registering a Topic? Can I just modify the <iframe> or am I gonna have to configure Apache to send a new header or something? Do I need to do anything (IE is iframe topic blocking opt-in or opt-out)?

Also, a thought if any ASSCLUB members are reading this: Can/should Cohost's iframely embeds also include the iframe topic block?

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lexi
@lexi

so if i understand it correctly, the topics api is enabled everywhere by default, and the only way to block it is adding it to the Permissions-Policy HTTP header. i have not seen any way to block it inside your HTML code, so it looks like you have to add that header in your web server (eg apache), like this:

Permissions-Policy: browsing-topics=()

this is annoying, but it is annoying on purpose and it looks like thats the best thing you can do

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ireneista
@ireneista

this is the latest iteration of the thing we specifically studied up on before leaving Google so that we could publicly oppose it when it got announced

however most of those important conversations happened a couple years ago and it turned out we weren't needed, Apple's privacy people did a good job on the analysis. it was very gratifying

so anyway in principle we should be able to figure out wtf the terminology means. we're doing a thing this weekend so we don't have time to dig in but we will try hard to circle back

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