"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release
the thing is, i don’t trust google. they’re an ad company. now that they have the marketshare, they’ve been leveraging it, hard. they’re changing the game for their own selfish, profit-driven purposes–not for users or users privacy and security, not for the health of the web, or anything else they may try to claim. it’s all about them making as much money as they can off you, your eyeballs, and your data.
You don’t have to “trust” them. You can just read the spec. See what it actually does for yourself.
I have no doubt that Google did not create this out of the good of their heart. They know 3rd party cookies are a dying tech and they need a replacement. But FLoC, their earlier attempt at a replacement, received a lot of very justified pushback for being a privacy nightmare. And they abandoned it, realising their error. In creating Topics, they’ve done a really good job of coming up with something that can support advertiser-funded business models while still respecting people’s privacy by design.