[rhaway84773]

3rd party tracking cookies are highly limited in the access they have. And they can easily be blocked using readily available 3rd party extensions or by clearing your browser of cookies.

This is tracking that’s baked right into the browser. There is very little limit to what data it can use to generate whatever information it does, and it follows you across the internet for perpetuity. It’s also a first party implementation so you’re completely beholden to Google’s decision to do what they want with it, and considering the IE like chokehold Chromium has on internet browsing, most people will be subject to whatever Google decides to do.

Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google.

There is a substantial qualitative difference between a 3rd party tool that can easily be blocked by the first party vendor (the browser) and or modifications to it using extensions, and a first party tool doing the tracking itself.

[jsnell]

Topics is going to be far easier to block with an extension, or to have an extension provide fake data for, than 3rd party cookies ever were.

Blocking 3rd party cookies always had a big risk of breaking stuff, since they could be used for legitimate purposes too, not just ad tracking and have built up a couple of decades worth of those legacy use cases. Topics is a tightly constrained single-purpose feature. Nothing will break when it's turned off or blocked.

But also, it's not like there's much reason to use an extension to block Topics, given it's an opt-in feature (unlike 3p cookies which were opt-out) and can be turned off at any time from the settings faster than installing an extension would be.

> Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google.

That's totally independent of Topics though.