I see a lot of hysteria over this. Compared to the current/old system, this is a change in the right direction. The old system relied on advertisers’ 3rd party cookies, and the advertiser themselves would track you from website to website. This new system creates a “topic” based on the website you’re looking at, and adds it to a list of “topics” based on websites you’ve previously visited. The advertisers no longer have any way to directly track you, because they’re only given a “topic” that shows something about a website you’ve previously visited (not your browser history, just a topic), which they use to supply an ad that may be relevant. Cookies aren’t used in this process, which is good.

But, as with all things, I expect Google will continuously increase the number of topics available to advertisers until the initial coarseness of topics is gone. This wouldn’t necessarily make it easier to track someone, but it could be used to target individuals. For example, if the current topic is “health”, that’s not a problem. But if, in the future, Google refines the topics to include illegal items like “psychedelics”, or even “abortion”, that could be used to target individuals for investigation by oppressive governments.

I reserve the right to change my mind on this new system at any point. For example, I don’t know how the topics are stored in the browser, or how easy they are to access by bad actors. But the removal of cookies from the process is good, and my mind won’t change about that.