Google has rolled out “Privacy Sandbox,” a Chrome feature first announced back in 2019 that, among other things, exchanges third-party cookies—the most common form of tracking technology—for what the company is now calling “Topics.” Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which we called “a terrible idea” because it gave Google even more control over advertising in its browser while not truly protecting user privacy. While there have been some changes to how this works since 2019, Topics is still tracking your internet use for Google’s behavioral advertising.

If you use Chrome, you can disable this feature through a series of three confusing settings.

Read more:

Klosowski, T. (2023, September 28). How To Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking—and Why You Should. EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-privacy-sandbox-ad-tracking-and-why-you-should