

"We don’t think cross-site data about the user’s browsing behavior should be exposed in APIs," he said. Unfortunately, it is hard to identify concrete ways in which this might be improved."Īnne van Kesteren, who works on web standards at Apple, cited ten issues with the API and declared that the iGiant is opposed to it. "Though the information the API provides is small, our belief is that this is more likely to reduce the usefulness of the information for advertisers than it provides meaningful protection for privacy. "Fundamentally, we just can't see a way to make this work from a privacy standpoint," said Mozilla distinguished engineer Martin Thomson, in January in response to a request for an official position statement from Karlin. We just can't see a way to make this work from a privacy standpoint Both Firefox maker Mozilla and Safari developer Apple have indicated they oppose the Topics proposal. It remains an open question, however, whether other browser makers will ever support the API.

"That's not a technical solution, but I do believe it goes a long way to addressing this problem. "Since this discussion, we've added a requirement on Chrome that developers enroll to use the API and to attest that they won't abuse the API," he wrote.
