Gregory's Server
@rcombs another angle: do you think those people don't know how bad such a proposal looks, especially coming from Google? Look at the list of non-goals, the number of counter-measures they propose to avoid this being too abusable, etc. They clearly understand your viewpoint as well, to some extent.
And yet they still thought it would be a good move to publish this proposal. Do you think they would have done so if "this ain't gonna solve that case" (or rather: "help", you can't "solve" abuse)?
No matter how good Google will try to be about this, bad actors on both ends will find ways to loophole and abuse it. The bots will just extract the data they need to from a chrome binary/fake their JS engine to mimic a real browser anyways. Ad networks will use these techniques to further fingerprint and identify browser users.
That's without getting into the perverse incentive problem where Google is also the world's biggest (and if you believe the EUs antitrust, only meaningful) ad network, so any solution they'll come up with will not be as perfect as it should be, *specifically* so they can make a loophole for profiling users.
No matter how good Google will try to be about this, bad actors on both ends will find ways to loophole and abuse it. The bots will just extract the data they need to from a chrome binary/fake their JS engine to mimic a real browser anyways. Ad networks will use these techniques to further fingerprint...