I think the answer to this is legislation. Tracking cookies are really frowned upon in the EU and more legislation is incoming. I think Google is protecting th

I think the answer to this is legislation. Tracking cookies are really frowned upon in the EU and more legislation is incoming. I think Google is protecting their business model of targeted ads and perhaps also as a reason to lobby for tracking ("look, we tried to propose alternatives but nobody adopted it so we need tracking"). I personally don't like targeted ads even if I am anonymous so I'm not happy with the changes still. If there's an option for generic ads I'll always choose it.