Outlaws stopped robbing stagecoaches too. (My point is, by the time this promise comes to fruition, I'm guessing it'll be legislated away as a choice in any case.)

1998 me said... I'm gonna stop downloading music with Napster in 2001 (the year they shutdown).

If privacy is important, and if stopping over tracking is so chivalrous, then why not turn it off right now?
[youtube.com...]

For all the spinning Google tries to do, in the end it is not about privacy but about money.

Google needed some time to check with A/B testing that the change from behavioral advertising to contextual advertising wouldn't hurt their baseline too much. It seems they have tweaked their contextual algorithms enough now to safely abandon user-tracking.

Yes, it's all about money, I agree, and we're talking about huge sums of money.

The FLoC tests [webmasterworld.com] show google is working on alternative ways.

I can't see the war on tracking and profiling getting easier for anyone (users, advertisers, Google and other ad companies) in the short to medium term.

I don't think this is about contextual advertising. This is just another form of profiling. But instead of tracking users on websites, the browser history is taken and evaluated, to put the user into some kind of category/categories.

Even though browser history may be hackable in browsers in general, I believe that this is something to be specifically implemented in Chrome. I personally would not ever give permission for evaluating my browser history. With Google's track record when it comes to privacy, I was using Chrome only for Google services anyway, and for testing webpages. That way, I don't have to remember to log out from my Google account every time.

How much this will be similar to tracking depends on the how fine grained the categories are that users are put into. If categories are coarse, it may not be so much of a privacy problem. But when categories get to be as fine as "Interested in raincoats in the previous week," "Interested in trousers in the previous week," "Interested in skirts in the previous week," "Interested in funerals or coffins in the previous week," ads will still be creepy.

It also depends on how often the browser history will be reevaluated by Google, for adjusting the user profile. If that happens every day, ads will be more creepy than if it happens every year or so.