Google has stated it plans to address developers’ concerns by “making web publishers promise not to abuse the API”.

Google’s new browser-based tracking functionality available via their “Topics API” has sparked numerous concerns recently, including fear that the heightened communication of web browser history could lead to “fingerprinting attacks” which could be used to track users across devices by profiling recent web history.

When prompted with this issue, Google started their short-term solution is to have web developers who enroll in the new Topics API platform take pledge that they will not abuse the new tool, whatever that means.

  • Daily reminder that Firefox is customizable to the point of removing Mozilla’s telemetry and making it look and feel almost like Chromium. And no, de-Googled Chromium probably isn’t enough because preliminary code for implementing WEI has been pushed upstream (basically they added the code which makes it possible for WEI to be implemented, strongly suggesting they’re intending to actually implement it upstream and not in Chrome)