Topics essentially works like this: rather than using cookies to track people around the web and figure out their interests from the sites they visit and the apps they use, websites can ask Chrome directly, via its Topics JavaScript API, what sort of things the user is interested in, and then display ads based on that. Chrome picks these topics of interest from studying the user’s browser history.
Isn’t this completely immoral? They are literally stealing the users private browsing history and uses it to boost their own profits.
They can’t drop third party cookies until they’ve got something other ad companies can use to send ads. Microsoft has a similar (but smaller) problem.
Ad companies + browsers + antitrust is a bad combination for everyone involved.
They have been planning to drop 3rd party cookies since 2021 with a deadline for EOY 2023 being pushed to EOY 2024.
That’s true, but that’s mostly because the tracking replacement wasn’t ready yet. If we kill Privacy Sandbox like everyone seems to want, third party cookies will stay in until Google can find another (probably worse) replacement.