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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." Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed...
Well, I did a little digging, and while parts of the stuff proposed by Google might be tricky, the actual topics portion of the API looks pretty easy to spoof. It seems like there’s really only two things that need to be done. The first is to spoof the feature detection logic to return true for calls to document.featurePolicy.allowsFeature('browsing-topics'). The second would be to return randomly selected topics from all available topics from calls to document.browsingTopics() (care might need to be taken to return a consistent set of random topics to a given page, otherwise clever sites might poll the API many times to detect randomness). That really seems to be all there is to the topics API part of this. As for spoofing the rest of the web DRM parts, that’s going to be a lot trickier, but with control of the browser I can’t see how it could be made insurmountable.
Well, I did a little digging, and while parts of the stuff proposed by Google might be tricky, the actual topics portion of the API looks pretty easy to spoof. It seems like there’s really only two things that need to be done. The first is to spoof the feature detection logic to return true for calls to
document.featurePolicy.allowsFeature('browsing-topics'). The second would be to return randomly selected topics from all available topics from calls todocument.browsingTopics()(care might need to be taken to return a consistent set of random topics to a given page, otherwise clever sites might poll the API many times to detect randomness). That really seems to be all there is to the topics API part of this. As for spoofing the rest of the web DRM parts, that’s going to be a lot trickier, but with control of the browser I can’t see how it could be made insurmountable.