[choppaface]

Right! This is the notion of incentive compatibility I'm trying to draw upon. One problem here is that not all of the incentives and objective functions are visible. That said, Google I'm certain has approved FLoC for launch based upon a mechanism, and so far I really see no evidence that that mechanism can actually be favorable to the wider public (not just "privacy geeks"). Would love to see Google's actual research that was provided to the launch committee, but I might as well ask for access to Area 51.

For the majority of users, I do believe tracking has some upshot, at least for reducing ad spam and ad fraud. It's really hard to prove this without a counterfactual study, but if you compare Facebook ads with the crap on news sites today, I think that situation is illustrative of a place where Facebook's improved targeting saves the user from a lot of spam / fraud. And I'd argue that outcome is a result of Facebook having a monopoly over their own targeting and identifiers.