these critiques surprise me. I didn't know about this announcement. When I looked it up, I found a thoughtful article that includes the paragraph:

"Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, baked in privacy protections from third-party cookies in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Neither of those browsers has anything like Privacy Sandbox, which makes them better options if you'd prefer more privacy."

They didn't even omit or downplay a recommendation to use a different browser!

Hell, yes!!

Would that I had more than just one boost to give...

See also people complaining that electric cars don't solve all the problems caused by cars.

Or, on a personal note, that I should replace flying with taking a train... on a transoceanic route.

ah a classic question: idealism versus practical harm reduction.

It's like the people who argue against giving heroin addicts access to safe needles.

EFF should be advising their followers to step out of the box that makes them the product. "Harm reduction" my ass.

I am no longer a follower, or a paying member. What I'm seeing lately is both moral and technical decline.

PS - Its hard to see an impact from EFF's fractional "harm reduction" when Google just shoved Chrome users into a new surveillance mode because too many were opting out of the old mode with blockers like uBlock Origin. If your workaround becomes popular, then #Google will react again with yet another scheme. That math won't add up. It is not reasonable to assume that Google is anything less than hostile to privacy at this point, but the EFF's behavior has been mollifying. #chrome

Doubtless your defenders here would dismiss all of this as some kind of FOSS purist pedantry, but it should concern you that their excuses sound like the old Internet Explorer hype of yore. With followers like that, something has gone wrong.

Yes, by that standard, the abolishment movement probably should have handed out leaflets how to deal better being whipped than running their mouth arguing for freeing the slaves to make themselves feel smart.

Especially as Google seems to have absolutely no qualm to take away what little control you have of your browsing experience. Notice how Manifest V3, the web browser attestation thing (that is already in the chromium source code), …

> If you use Chrome, you can disable this feature through a series of three confusing settings.

A more complete story would also have posted links to alternative browsers. It can't be any harder to install FF than it is to work through "a series of three confusing settings" to disable the privacy sandbox "feature" in Chrome.

eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-…

How To Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking—and Why You Should

Google has rolled out "Privacy Sandbox," a Chrome feature first announced back in 2019 that, among other things, exchanges third-party cookies—the most common form of tracking technology—for what the company is now calling "Topics.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}