Technology

Reminder: Chrome is made by a company that got rich working as middleman for advertisements. Don't trust any claim that it's trying to keep your privacy or what have you, it does not. Anyone who cares about privacy should be avoiding Chrome as much as reasonable/possible. Firefox is easy to install.

That said, this tutorial is useful if for some reason you're "stuck" with Chrome, due to something broken that doesn't work in other browsers.

Comments from The Verge:

Serious question, why would I turn this off? // Ads are going to keep coming. I want ads to get better for me not worst or generic. I visit The Verge daily, I don't care if Google or Third-parties know that. If they use that information to target ads related to technology, excellent. // There's things that I always want to keep private, but I couldn't care less about my browsing habits. If I want to search for a subject and I don't want Google to target ads related to that later, I just use incognito mode.

You might not care about your browsing habits, but plenty people do, they want to minimise the amount of their personal information leaking to businesses. It's a mistake to associate incognito mode with any meaningful amount of privacy.

[Replying to the above] Exactly. this new feature is a win for privacy and it will only happen if advertisers and sites support it, and they will only support it if users use it. If you want to block ads you can still do that! But turning this feature off only signals to advertisers that our existing privacy-wrecking tracking-based advertising is the only way to go.

Most people will use it, as it's by default on, regardless of their best interests, so the tutorial still helps those who go out of their way to avoid it. Also, I think that we shouldn't assume that the Topics API will not be as privacy-wrecking as the "old" ways to vulture on your data.