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I genuinely think this is a step in the right direction.

Website operators need to get paid. Advertising helps subsidize their costs, often allowing them to provide their services for free. But this is usually done via third party cookies, which means you have no control over what information is collected about you and your behavior, or who it's sent to. Since they are usually implemented by the website itself, they can collect pretty fine-grained data on you. There is no reason for any of these adtech platforms to let you customize or access this data.

Google is about to follow Apple's lead and forbid third party cookies. This is unequivocally a Good Thing. But there has to be an alternative so that advertising can continue to hold up the internet and keep it freely accessible.

The best solution is to move that information into the browser itself, where you can control it. That's true privacy: the ability to choose what others know about you. If you want anonymity, you can turn it off. It's a solution that covers all the bases.




> But there has to be an alternative so that advertising can continue to hold up the internet and keep it freely accessible.

Sure, the alternative is paid sites and free (user created and supported) sites. This is what existed for decades before the web, and for the first decade of the the web. It was a better, safer, more democratic net - one orientated around information, education and self expression rather than persuasion and commerce. If you don't miss it, it's likely because you never experienced it.

Advertising is literally a rebranding of propaganda, it consumes our attention, readjusts our values, blights usability, and sways us from rational, connected individuated thinking and decision making - toward conformist, manipulated, consumptive decision making. It's a cultural blight.


Paid sites restrict access to those with less money. Free sites are charities affordable only to those with more (and regularly die off with too much traffic). How is that more preferable?


> But there has to be an alternative so that advertising can continue to hold up the internet and keep it freely accessible

This dichotomy is false. You can still advertise to users without having any tracking data about them other than the service or site they are using. Just as advertising has done in most other major industries, be it print media, television, or physical advertisements such as billboards.

It's not as crazy insanely lucrative !== it's not profitable enough to work.


I'm also curious about regional ads. All this talk about topics, etc. is mostly a non-issue for me, but what is the current state about ip/location/regionalized ads? Is this already off the table because the website gets my IP when I browse to them? Some websites ask for the browsers geo information which has a permission toggle - I haven't noticed if those correlate to more specific regionalized ads.


And with the new system, you can do that by simply turning it off. The point is that now you can turn it off.


And by simply turning off you mean:

1. Go to: chrome://settings/adPrivacy

2. Click Ad topics

3. Turn off toggle.

4. Click back Arrow.

5. Click Site-suggested ads

6. Turn off Toggle.

7. Click back arrow.

8. Click Ad measurement

9. Turn off toggle.

10. Repeat the same on every computer you have Chrome installed on.

11. Figure out if this is also an issue on mobile browsers installed, and if not, when it will be rolling out to disable it then.

12. Hope that an update doesnt flip the toggles.


That's a matter of UX. Again, the point is that now you can turn it off. This was not possible before, full stop. That's what I mean by it being a step in the right direction: it finally gives you central authority on what sites know about you.




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