Oddbean

@2a48eef0 this is crazy ass misrepresentation. 1) the web is advertising driven 2) advertisers wanted targeted ads, which is done with tracking via 3rd party cookies 3) Google is going to stop supporting third party cookies in the near future. Topics is a triple blind technology to provide a slight indication of what a user is interested in.

@2a48eef0 topics doesn't track your history, it tracks the classification of the sites you visit against a relatively small set of categories. This is a sunset of the categories used by the ad agencies. If you view 25 pages across 3 different movie criticism sites, there might be 25 pips in the "movies". Very high level. There is no direct tracking of your history.

@2a48eef0 those counts are accumulated for a week and then categories the user has shown most interest in (the onea with the biggest counts) are collected and saved. All other counts are saved. If you went to a "shoe store" site one time, it will not make it into your topics list.

@2a48eef0 only 3 weeks of 5 topics will be retained. You stop showing an interest in movies, it will drop off your topics. When pages hit that API, they will get a random topic from each week. Not all 15, just 1 from each week. The page can't ask "is he interested in fly fishing". They get RANDOM values from a SUBSET of your interests over a BRIEF window time.

@f1c2774e Elephant in the room: Google is not good, and nothing that they have done for the past couple decades is pro-privacy or pro-freedom. With that out of the way... this is Google legitimizing their existing data farming by hiding it behind categories. They make no guarantees about removing data.

@2a48eef0 this is distinct from their own data collection from Google properties. This is based on the usage patterns in Chrome. As always, using another browser is an option. Or turn it off. My expectation is that IF it pans out (adoption by advertisers) and 3rd party cookies are removed by Chrome, other browsers will follow suit

@f1c2774e "this is distinct from their own data collection from Google properties." What were you saying about absolutes? We have zero proof of what you assert. Sure, that is what the press release may say... but you know how well that goes. Google also insists it does not censor search results, yet we have evidence of them doing exactly that.

@2a48eef0 "We have zero proof of what you assert." My understanding is that this is in the open source chromium project, and if that's correct we do have a way to validate the assertion. I'm not defending Google. Just saying that the article was misrepresenting the scope of the technology. 'nuff said