Google’s data harvesting competitors no longer have a seat at the table for how data harvesting will work.

As if governments are going to allow that. Google is already being investigated for their plans to disable third party cookies by other advertisers. That’s part of the reason why they’re doing this anyway. The rest of the ad industry has gathered behind their own standard, which is much more invasive. The British CMA has stepped in to make sure Google doesn’t remove first party cookies too soon, because that would impede other advertisers.

Google wants to get rid of a large part of their data gathering system because collecting all of that data is a huge business risk, up to 4% of global revenue under the GDPR, but if they were to disable third party cookies tomorrow, they’d get fined to hell and back by antitrust lawsuits.

I don’t really get why it’s “Tracking Cookies 2.0”. Data is stored and analysed locally and, from a technology point of view, allows for user customisation. Chrome doesn’t offer that customisation beyond offering the user the ability to remove a detected topic (get it together, Google!) but I can’t say I can see that much of a problem with giving websites a 33% chance of learning that I like computer technology.

This is not to be confused with Unified ID, an attempt to standardise invasive tracking procedures, using PII as a source for generating identifiers. This includes “normalisation” of email addresses (so turning [email protected] into [email protected] to bypass people trying to find out who’s selling their email address).

There are other Google technologies that are much worse; remote attestation of Javascript, for example, which is already in use in Safari, though it’s not as bad as Google’s proposal. The design and UX of Chrome’s FLoC implementation is also pretty shit. However, I think the privacy impact of the new system is drastically overstated.