It's pretty masterful marketing by Google really.

They've re-defined privacy to mean "hidden to everyone but google" as in, "google knows everything about me and does a really good job of keeping that information secure".

I'm very quickly becoming old and weird for clinging to the belief that no one, including google, should know anything about me other than things I explicitly tell them, and they should only use those things for purposes I explicitly permit.

Gen Y often talk about "responsible ads". Or threads about "devs need to get paid (through intrusive ad platforms)". It's... exasperating. I got a notification on my Android phone to configure topic reporting for apps a few days ago.

Google says Topics warning is anti-innovative fearmongering

I'm sorry, google... what did you say?! I cant seem to hear you over the ceaseless, deafening sound of you scraping my data.

Switched to Mozilla last month haven’t looked back

A few details:

The author feels comfortable enough to claim by himself that the "privacy" "sandbox" is neither private or a sandbox. That is not a quote. Google isn't fooling anyone with this move.

The alleged "five major goals" behind FLoC v2 aka Topics:

1. Fighting spam and fraud: it doesn't.
2. Showing relevant ads and content: except that most people despise advertisement, and the better informed ones avoid targetted advertisement even further.
3. Measuring digital advertisement: besides Google itself, nobody cares that much about this shit. And Google only cares about it to min-max profits.
4. Strengthening cross-site privacy boundaries: I'm really sceptic on this.
5. Limiting covert tracking: while overt tracking goes rampant, right?

"Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which we called 'a terrible idea' because it gave Google even more control over advertising in its browser while not truly protecting user privacy," said Thorin Klosowski, EFF security and privacy activist, in a web essay.

I'm preaching to the choir given the comm, but that's why one doesn't trust Google. It forces it until it gets things going its way.

I wonder how much this means that people shouldn't touch even Chromium with a 3m pole.

Sorry Chrome, I've given my heart to Foxkeh