Advertisers and publishers don't really want tracking and data collection. It carries huge costs (technical as well as social) with very little benefit for advertising. Advertisers want statistically significant and unbiased population samples, and that's not something you can arrive at by blindly throwing more data at it.
Data collection by Google et al., is really because they eventually want to pivot from adtech to govtech - think "social credit" or "Minority Report". From their vantage point of course it's a much more lucrative and advantageous place to be than a mere seller of internet clickbait.
It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be? They want legit population samples versus the ‘noise’ of huge amounts of random individual use data?
But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
Yes, if it can be made into some objective standard, and not just another "trust me, I'm Google".
> But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.
Yes, because Google is not just an adtech company. Obviously they are more than that. (Or at least they want to be.)