[privacylawthrow]

>It was never going to be the privacy savior Google billed it as, so why push forward with the concept?

Because these users are still anonymous to companies using Google services. Uniquely identifying users, and the liability for doing so, falls to intermediary services. I expect it will be the domain of data brokers like LiveRamp, Epsilon, and others.

"Use Google and be compliant" is a good sales tool and good value for companies that use Google services. Companies that don't want to sell data to brokers will stick with Google.

[morelisp]

The number of companies that want to sell to brokers is rapidly increasing though - basically all retail wants to, or spins off a BI division that wants to. They hired all those data scientists, gotta find something for them to do…

[privacylawthrow]

Data scientists would rather buy data to work with big data sets than sell their own data for money. It's the marketers and people with P&L obligations that usually want to sell.