[esteth]

I totally appreciate the desire not to want an advertising profile build for you at all! I think that in practice, interest-based-advertising is going to happen, and I think if chrome can provide a way for it to be done without involving so many sketchy third-parties then I'm for that.

I don't know a huge amount about the wider ecosystem here, but I can imagine that if chrome were to disable third-party cookies without providing an alternative, then advertisers will go to fairly great lengths to fingerprint you to build a profile.

Right now my guess is that Firefox users benefit from the fact that it's probably not worth investing all that much in alternative tracking techniques since you capture the vast majority of people with techniques which work in chromium browsers.

Again, I really don't know that much about all this, but my feeling is that this is moving in the right direction, even if it's not the solution I'd ultimately prefer as an individual user.

[kjkjadksj]

I think a big flaw of interest based ads is that my interests rarely line up with what I am in the market for. Say I am interested in some hobby. I probably have all my gear already, and if I buy new gear it means doing enough research to breach through the fog of marketing to see it for what it is. I might spend all my days reading about hobby x online, when I really ought to be advertised the differences of some other products y and z that I actually will buy, which I only see when I visit a physical store and see them together on a shelf.

[josho]

What is lost in this discussion is that now my browser, software on my machine, using my resources is the agent that is acting against my own interests.

[tantalor]

Your browser has been serving ad banners since 1994, nothing new here.

[dspillett]

The simple display of a sponsored banner and the systematic tracking of people throughout their online activities are not the same thing.

[tantalor]

> not the same thing

Never said they were, only that they both using your browser & resources "against your own interests", and this is not a good argument against tracking.

[dspillett]

When just displaying a static banner add, your browser is a lot more passive than implied by "agent that is acting" in the GPP. Simply displaying an image (with a little HTML for the link) and perhaps caching it in local storage is quite different from collecting & collating logs about you and distributing that back out to the where internet.

You are right about the bit of the post you noticed though, both do use at least some resources. This system more, but the simple banner still some.