Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328428, except for the ones specifically about this post.

It is impossible for me to take this post at face value coming from a director at Google. That old saying about getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it comes to mind...

That said, the actions they've taken are concrete and verifiable, and this is a pretty explicit promise. I believe it has less to do with privacy as a goal and more to do with avoiding regulation.

* And another post on the front page indicates that Google is changing the way they track anyways, likely at little-to-no cost to them. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328428

It's sad to me that a fair amount of the people actually doing the work at Google believe the company line on this stuff. I suspect because some of the work does hamper Google's ability to track. It just hampers Google less than other tracking companies. Thus, it's still a net gain.

People working on AMP, Manifest V3, and so on don't seem to understand how the leadership is playing them like chess pieces.

This is about as legitimate as a white paper from North Korea or Israel about now their nukes don't exist

I cringed on every third sentence in the Google post.

E.g. "People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising."

This sounded a lot like: "Chickens shouldn't have to accept lower-quality feed in order to get the benefits of a more efficient slaughterhouse."

I don't want the "benefits" of relevant advertising.

I hope Google's moves are too little too late to avoid regulation. We really need regulation.

The author of the post deserves an award for doublespeak. It's like Facebook's lawyers saying "user privacy hurts small businesses, therefore let us collect all your information".