Apple last week celebrated a series of privacy changes coming to its Safari browser and took time to slam rival Google for its Topics system, which displays online ads based on your Chrome history.
Apple EXPOSES Google's Secret Tracking System – The Shocking Truth About Topics API
The iPhone maker, citing a research paper by Yohan Beugin and Patrick McDaniel of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, claims that Topics helps digital fingerprints that can be used by advertisers to identify previously unknown web users, a long-standing problem for many. There are fears that netizens can still be tracked around the web using the Topics API in Chrome, or that people who have tried to hide their identities from advertisers could be rediscovered using the technology.
An attempt by Google to thwart this fingerprint with a bit of randomness isn't good enough, we're told.
"The authors use large-scale browser data from real users (voluntarily donated) to show both how the five percent noise that should provide plausible deniability for users can be defeated, and how the Topics API can be used to fingerprint and re-identify users." The Apple WebKit team's report is correct.
