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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Is that part of the chromium engine which is open source or is it closed source ? Because if that part of the code is not visible it doesn't matter what Google tells you.
It's part of the open source chromium engine.
Here's how it implements some of the privacy sandbox stuff for example: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox/
and here's some of the Topics API stuff: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/browsing_topics/
Theoretically they could still inject malicious code even if the stuff in the chromium source code looks fine. Given they got sued for their servers still tracking you while Chrome was in Incognito mode (even with the warning every time you open Incognito mode), I'd imagine any injection of code like that would result in another lawsuit (or several). At some point you either have to trust that Google is implementing things how they say they are in the code that they put out or just use a different browser.
I checked your link but as most people I'm not programmer, so we can't check or even remotely understand what Google engineers does. On the other hand, what common people can understand is 'follow the money ́. Google makes most of its money on selling personalized ads, the more data they get on you the higher advertiser will bid.
It would make absolutely no sense, financially, for Google to reduce it's tracking ability and let the user decide which ad they want to see or not.
And at the end Google is a business, money goes in, more money goes out. They could be doing what they claim to do right now, only to change in 2 years when all third party advertiser are bankrupt because they can't use cookies anymore. That's another possibility.
The way I see it, Google knows that changes are coming to the advertising industry, either through regulations or just public opinion. By doing this now, they can try to get ahead of those changes/criticisms while controlling what systems their advertising competitors will have to operate under. I don't doubt that Google will still have enough data to do relevant advertising, either with the data from these new systems in the browser or the first-party data they have on people through their sites.