Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Google worked on Privacy Sandbox/Topics API/FLoC for at least five years, and it couldn't get something that advertisers, regulators, and users could all agree on, so it's just falling back to the thing that worked (but has next to zero privacy protections). Sigh.
Yeah, this is a loss for user privacy.
Also a reminder that accepting an alternative tracking method is likely to just end up with 2 different ways to track you rather than one slightly less invasive one.
Google never had any intention whatsoever of prioritising your privacy over their advertising revenue. This technology was 100% designed to shut other operators out of the tracking and advertising market and 0% to reduce their ability to track you and advertise to you. Never in a million years were they going to spend a lot of time, effort and money destroying the source of their money. Hobble competitors, yes. Hobble themselves? Never. Not even a little bit.
I think that's a matter of perspective. IMO it didn't work, it was broken, that's why we're even talking about it.