Hypothesis: the real motivation is that Google has determined the following:
1) we can sell all our ads for just as much money anyway, even without targeting based on web browsing, because the advertisers will take what we let them get
2) targeting based on browsing history is more complicated, requiring more developers and server capacity, which Google could certainly afford but it has plenty of other things to do that pay off better
3) it turns out that advertising based on what website you are currently on, works just as well anyway; to put it another way, all that "show a person who just bought a car an ad for another car" targeting was not really working.
"We respect privacy" sounds better than "our targeting accomplished almost nothing and you'll buy the ads anyway."
> to put it another way, all that "show a person who just bought a car an ad for another car" targeting was not really working.
Boy that sure is true for me and has been for a long time. I'm often bewildered not by how accurate my ads are, but rather by how braindead they seem to be. I'm not convinced algorithm-based ads work at all.
In fact I would hypothesize that ads are often more effective when they are unexpected, for something the viewer has never considered buying before. A targeted system would hide such ads.
Well this is kinda obvious - and a good thing I guess? If Google can sell ads without tracking everyone, that seems like the best win? It protects our privacy and removes them from the fight for more tracking in pretty much the easiest way possible.
Google doesn't work that way, and in general a corporation pretty much converges to a point where they will put resources on wherever there's dollar.
You are underestimating the big picture, which is - google is really left between apple and regulations (gdpr, ccpa etc) pushing privacy front and google have no choice but to go in this area.
"...will put resources on wherever there's a dollar."
Yes, but it may be that they've decided there's no dollar here. Or, to put it another way, they get that dollar whether they track your browser history or not, so why bother? It's more like cutting corners, which corporations are most certainly willing to do, but in this case we like it (but that is probably only incidentally of interest to top executives).
1) we can sell all our ads for just as much money anyway, even without targeting based on web browsing, because the advertisers will take what we let them get
2) targeting based on browsing history is more complicated, requiring more developers and server capacity, which Google could certainly afford but it has plenty of other things to do that pay off better
3) it turns out that advertising based on what website you are currently on, works just as well anyway; to put it another way, all that "show a person who just bought a car an ad for another car" targeting was not really working.
"We respect privacy" sounds better than "our targeting accomplished almost nothing and you'll buy the ads anyway."