Honestly I don't think this follows at all. 1. Advertising has been so successful arguably at the expense of users. Because it has been made easy, this has dis

Honestly I don't think this follows at all. 1. Advertising has been so successful arguably at the expense of users. Because it has been made easy, this has distorted the marketplace to the point where it's hard for any other model to thrive. 2. The organizations (principally google) behind this are the shady organizations who sell location data as well as using it for themselves. This is just about them entrenching their market advantage. 3. The ability to strip individual identities from those datasets and make the level of targeting aligned with something very course grained like interests leaves google as the only people who can identify the individuals in those datasets given the stuff they add to their browser. I don't see how that's net positive for users in any way. Floc[1] was roundly rejected and this topics API is just an attempt to do exactly the same thing and pretend that it's different. Whenever people make this argument it's worth pointing out that Ad spend in far less personally tracked contexts (eg billboards, static advertising, broadcast ads etc) is massive. Advertisers spend money even if they don't know much if anything about who's seeing their ads. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts