Should have laughed if this was a corporate device. They ignored the continuous popups for too long and was forced into compliance at an inconvenient time because they couldn't be bothered to reboot at the end of the day for likely 2 weeks.
There is a lot of misinformation being shared in this thread.
A good excerpt from Steve Gibson covering Topics on SecurityNow #935
What I do know, though, is that user profiling via tracking represents the height of privacy intrusion. As far as I know, an immutable record of every website I have ever visited is squirreled away in multiple massive hidden and inaccessible-to-me profiling databases. And I have zero control over that. That's the world we're in today. But if Topics succeeds, and Google would appear to be in the position to singlehandedly deliver its success, it is a far less intrusive profiling technology. And in addition to being a much weaker information gatherer, Google has chosen to provide its users complete control over the Topics their browser presents to the world, including turning it off altogether for full anonymity. I'll explain that further in a minute.
So if only on that basis, Topics at least represents a huge step in the right direction. Yes, by default some interest profiling remains. But the means of obtaining those significantly weakened profiles is no longer tracking. And users have complete visibility into their online profile and are able to curate, edit, and even delete any of it or all of it as they choose. So it's a compromise. But there are many websites begging for our support. My feeling is, if voluntarily letting them know something about who we are allows them to generate, as they claim, significantly more revenue from our visit, is that too high a price to pay? Again, it's an individual decision. But now, in a world with Topics, at least, it's one we're able to make.
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Okay. So here's how Topics works. The essence of Topics are individual topic tokens - zero, one, or many - which are assigned to individual websites. For example, my GRC.com site might be associated with Computers and Electronics/Network Security, and Computers and Electronics/Programming, and Networking/Internet Security. So when someone visited GRC.com, their own web browser would record their interest in the topics associated with GRC.com, those topics, those three. But their visit to GRC.com itself would never be recorded other than in their regular local browser history as is always done. The only thing retained by the browser to indicate their interest in those topics would be those three numbered parameters.
For example, in Google's current 349-topic list, which they refer to as a "taxonomy," there's "Arts and Entertainment" as a general topic if nothing more specific is available. But then there's "Arts and Entertainment," and then under that "Acting and Theater," and "Comics," "Concerts and Music Festivals," "Dance," "Entertainment Industry," "Humor." And under "Humor" is the subtopic "Live Comedy." And it goes on like that with "Arts and Entertainment" having a total of 56 token entries before we switch to "Autos and Vehicles," which has 29 subcategories, which brings us to "Beauty and Fitness" and so on. You get the idea.
So here's how Google's specification explains this. They said: "The topics are selected from an advertising taxonomy. The initial taxonomy proposed for experimentation will include somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand topics." They said: "Our initial design includes around 350." And I counted them, it's 349. "As a point of reference, the IAB Audience Taxonomy contains around 1,500 individual topics and will attempt to exclude sensitive topics." And they said: "We're planning to engage with external partners to help define this. The eventual goal is for the taxonomy to be sourced from an external party that incorporates feedback and ideas from across the industry."
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Google explains: "The topics will be inferred by the browser. The browser will leverage a classifier model to map site hostnames to topics. The classifier weights will be public, perhaps built by an external partner, and will improve over time. It may make sense for sites to provide their own topics via meta tags, headers, or JavaScript, but that remains an open discussion for later."
You're right, about 100 years ago it did used to be like that. Local banks aren't a thing anymore. While Co-op banking institutions are better for the local community, they're also investing in options outside the local community, further depleting the resources of the 30% of customers who shop at more affordable locations
That's the point though. The profits don't go to locals, they stay within the owner's for their second cottage and new boat. Very rarely do local stores actually benefit anybody other than themselves.
It's blaming people that go into thrift stores looking for items to immediately flip for profit online, depriving the community of needed material resources at an affordable price.
Local stores that were profiting off their customers and not giving back to the community lose 30% of their customers who weren't benefiting in any way from a local store to more affordable options when available? Wow
Understanding core concepts is more important than being able to recite them verbatim. Knowing where to find the information and how to understand the information is more important than memorizing. Outside of the school system you'll always have the internet available in the workplace.
Expeditionary Force is a fun sci-fi saga with great narration and lots of funny bits. If you're not paying attention and miss half a chapter it doesn't really matter too much. Book 7.5 is a full cast epic production with a few well known sci-fi actors.
If you're looking for something that'd you'd get at the pharmacy for $10 then Jack Reacher is pretty fun for the first 10 or so books. I find the most interesting bit being that they're contemporary and basically released annually with the first being released in 1997. You can see the technology change and the world around Jack change. I tapped out after book 20 or so but it was an enjoyable enough experience.
TL;DR: If you want to use Chrome then don't be worried about Topics. It's better privacy than third party cookies and other tracking methods.