| This means that your browser starts spying on you, whereas currently, ‘only’ sites do. If you use Chrome, it will use information about all pages you visit, even ones without tracking cookies to categorize you for advertisers. Google says that will happen locally, but even if you trust them, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. You could even see it as “now I pay the bill for getting myself categorized for Google’s ad business”. Soon, Chrome also will start blocking third-party cookies to protect you from evil Meta and its ilk (all because Google wants to protect you from them, not because Meta competes with Google in the advertising space, of course) So, as before, Google won’t be able to see what users do inside Meta’s apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), but now Meta won’t be able to see what Chrome users do outside them. > but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data It won’t all stay on your machine; a summary of it will be sent to Google so that they can sell targeted ads to advertisers. I expect they’ll have quite a few different tags, including age, gender, and location, and shopping preferences. |