this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Google's new ad system is called Topics. If you want to understand how it works, I would like to point you to Security Now Ep 935 in which Steve Gibson gives a pretty thorough analysis.
Marcus' take in the image is overly simplistic and a bit FUD. The intention is for Topics to replace current ad tracking systems such as tracking pixels and other metrics. In conjunction with implementing Topics, Google is removing third-party cookies from Chrome, which will eliminate most of the current invasive tracking tools.
I'm not really a Google fanboy and I'll probably just stick with Firefox personally, but everything about Topics sounds less privacy invasive than the way things are done now. If Google can force this change on the internet advertising market it will actually be an improvement for user privacy.
Other browsers have been blocking third-party cookies for quite a while, so I cannot imagine any ad network which doesn't already have alternative solutions in place and is therefore simply given more identifying data by this system. If Google genuinely wanted to change the ad model, they'd block tracking scripts by default.