Change These Chrome Settings If You Don’t Want To Be

Chrome rolled out some new very aggressive ad tracking features in their latest in stall.

Here’s how Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, phrased it:

And that’s basically all you need to know.

Go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages.

A bit more background:

While Google is promoting this as a move towards a more private web, critics argue otherwise. The company claims that this new system will eventually replace third-party tracking cookies, suggesting that the Privacy Sandbox is a better alternative. Notably, browsers like Apple’s Safari and Firefox have been blocking third-party cookies for years and have no plans to adopt Google’s new system. Google’s decision to introduce this platform was influenced by Apple’s move to block third-party cookies in Safari in 2020, which impacted Google’s revenue. Google’s stance is that there needs to be a tracking alternative, implying that users can’t avoid being tracked entirely. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized this perspective, suggesting that the focus should be on eliminating targeted ads altogether.

A lot more background:

If you still want to know more, check out Ron Amadeo’s article on arstechnica: Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome.