“For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it’s a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you…. No, no, no, that’s wrong.”
Google sells the Topics API as privacy, and Jon von Tetzchner calls it what it is: your own browser building an ad profile on you. He says Google and Microsoft sites soft-blocked Vivaldi until a user agent string changed. Tracking was supposed to make ads pay better, and sites now hide behind paywalls that barely existed 15 years ago. Surveillance advertising made Google rich and left publishers poorer.