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.
So with Topics and the removal of 3rd party cookies Google can then have a monopoly on behavior based ad tracking since they also have 64% of the browsing market. This is also bad.
This is absolutely the big problem. Google already has a near monopoly on internet advertising, with Facebook/Meta being their only real competitor. If Google has full control over the interest tracking/targeting technology and it's inescapable because it's part of the browser engine then they are effectively the gatekeepers of all internet advertising. Meta could still operate as an advertising agency but wouldn't be able to implement any of their own technology, they'd have to just use what Google allows them to.
Definitely bad, but is it worse than tracking pixels (which came out of Facebook Beacon)? From an end-user privacy sense, I think Topics might be better as it doesn't keep track of your specific web activity, only general interest categories for the websites that you visit within a period of three weeks - and the record is kept locally in your browser, not on a corporate server.
It's not part of the browser engine. It's part of the browser "chrome" (part of its namesake), the thing around the browser engine. So this isn't in Edge and goes without saying, it isn't in Firefox etc.
It's still bad. Chrome is still a popular browser.
Edit: it does keep track of your browser activity, just doesn't share the whole bunch of data with their parties.