> Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
Once you accept that premise, then it's a matter of balancing privacy, volume of ads, and payments to creators (ad tech companies are going to get theirs). Do you think the majority of people would prefer fewer, better targeted / higher yielding ads as long as it is tracking them anonymously? Or more ads, with worse targeting? Or neither and less payments to creators?
I can see both sides of this. There's the side of me that looks at advertising and sees it as a necessary annoyance. It's the primary funding source for the open web today, and thus far that model has been very successful. Advertising has enabled the development of well polished, incredibly useful software like YouTube, Google Maps, search engines, etc without requiring users to directly pay a single cent for those services.
Then there's the Stallmanesqe, crypto-anarchist side of me that says it's my machine and it shouldn't do anything that doesn't directly benefit me. Tracking and ads don't directly benefit me, so my machine shouldn't cooperate in running them and if your business can't survive under those conditions then it doesn't deserve to.
I'm not 100% on how to resolve that tension, but I can't really fault Google for the way they're handling it. (As an optional, yet on-by-default feature that cooperates in serving relevant ads in a way that's more private than cookies but less private than just blocking everything.)
There is no paid-internet without ads -- so it's not that people prefer free we don't really have a group to test against. Maybe it's like the choice between water and no-water -- results show that humans like water.
But choices like: free water with punch-in-the-face VS paid water without punching would be better indicators of choice.
When there are few/no options then choice is an illusion.
> Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
I have no objection to adverts based on what I am looking at at the time, or more random blanket advertising⁰, as long as they are not too obtrusive or intrusive: flashing ads, auto-playing audio, and so forth, are out.
Unfortunately modern ad tech is apparently inseparable from following us around our online existence logging everything we do, which is on the list of things I consider to be too intrusive.
> as long as it is tracking them anonymously
Yes. But call me a cynic if you will: I don't trust that the proposed system is as guaranteed to be anonymous as is claimed (or at least implied).
> payments to creators?
Remuneration for creators is why I don't use sponsorblock and such. Sponsor segments aid the creators without having to track me wherever I go online.
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[0] though I am getting tired of seeing adverts for Temu everywhere, anything broadcast en-mass to the point of annoyance¹ well never result in me buying a product or using a service
[1] I could name several others, Temu is just the most recent example
If there was only a single choice for advertisers to place a completely static banner on the page, they would still be happy. As long as no other advertiser had more capabilities.
Restrict them all and the money would still flow as the ads would increase sales just as much.
It boils down to greed. Targeted ads are proven to have larger profits, which increases the more precise the targeting is.
No advertiser wants to go back to dumb ad campaigns like they used to run on traditional media, simply because they're far less profitable.
Which is why they're concerned about the restricted and more general profiles the Topics API will give them. They want even more granular topics[1], and Google can do this at any point once the controversy has died down, and this feature gains traction.
Make no mistake that if this turns out to be less profitable, many advertisers will still resort to cookie tracking, fingerprinting, and any other shady mechanism, as long as the browser and lack of regulation allow them to do so.
Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
Once you accept that premise, then it's a matter of balancing privacy, volume of ads, and payments to creators (ad tech companies are going to get theirs). Do you think the majority of people would prefer fewer, better targeted / higher yielding ads as long as it is tracking them anonymously? Or more ads, with worse targeting? Or neither and less payments to creators?