Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

> That framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

I don't want to be tracked. I never have wanted to be tracked. I shouldn't have to aggressively opt-out of tracking; it should be a service one must opt-in to receive. And it's not something we can trust industry to correct properly. This is precisely the role that privacy-protecting legislation should be undertaking.

Stop spying on us, please.

There are so many hobbies and interests where the rich, meaty information people can benefit from is found on old-school blogs and websites that their owners have maintained without expecting to make much money at all, besides the occasional click-through to an Amazon referral link.

However, those blogs and websites have now become hard to find because they have been pushed down in search results due to Google's changed algorithms and ad-supported websites heavy on SEO – sometimes those ad-supported websites are literal copies of earlier advertising-free blogs where a developing-world freelancer was paid to rewrite all the content just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown. Also, the advertising-supported world of mobile social-media apps has made people today less likely to step outside of their walled gardens and consider small third-party independent websites.

So, to a degree, things would work better in certain cases if targeted-advertising-supported websites disappeared; their decline would reveal a whole world of useful free content that was there the whole time.