Google Just Gave You the Best Reason Yet to Finally Quit Using Chrome
upstart writes:
Google Just Gave You the Best Reason Yet to Finally Quit Using Chrome:
A while back, Google said that it was on board with the idea that cookies--the little pieces of software code that websites use to do all sorts of things like keeping you logged in, to letting an advertiser know when you've clicked on their ad and then made a purchase--were bad. At least, the third-party kind--the ones that track your activity across the internet. Those types of cookies would be blocked in Chrome by 2023.
[...] Google's real problem is that it can't just shut off third-party cookies entirely since that would be very bad for its competition and might look like it was leveraging the fact that not only does it control the world's largest advertising platform, but also its most popular web browser, Chrome. Considering the attention that regulators and lawmakers are paying to big tech companies, that was a non-starter.
So, Google said it would introduce an alternative known as Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. The short version is that Chrome would track your browsing history and use it to identify you as a part of a cohort of other users with similar interests. Advertisers would then target ads to the "I like to buy expensive ski outfits," cohort, or the "I just turned 50 and have 2 kids about to enter college and want to re-finance my mortgage" cohort.
[...] Now, Google is introducing an alternative it calls Topics. The idea is that Chrome will look at your browsing activity and identify up to five topics that it thinks you're interested in. When you visit a website, Chrome will show it three of those topics, with the idea that the site will then show you an ad that matches your interest.
Google says that Chrome will allow users to view the Topics they are associated with, and give them the ability to delete them. Google isn't asking users if they'd like to be part of Topics, it's just leveraging the fact that it owns Chrome in order to force users to be a part and then giving them a way to opt out if they want. That's great, except almost no one is ever going to do that. Google knows that.
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