"Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities
This was overwhelming rejected by everyone, including Microsoft, Mozilla, Safari, and others. It's universally disliked, and Google knows this, but they intentionally know they're abusing their monopoly to push anti-consumer bullshit.
I think I'll just invite Google to come get my dna, set up cameras everywhere, and install a microchip in my brain. Then I can be done with this slow-walk of privacy invasion.
In Chrome, start at the three dots in the upper-right corner and go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Ad privacy. (Or just type
chrome://settings/adPrivacy into your address field.) The ad privacy page lets you turn off Chrome's targeted ads.
A few years ago, I switched from Firefox to Chrome. A few months ago, I switched back to Firefox. Chrome is rolling out changes which are completely unacceptable, such as making adblockers impossible, and using my private browsing history for their own ads.
Everyone talks about Firefox. And that's cause Firefox is good and hands down the best. But I've been using Vivaldi which is chromium based for years. Anyone have any opinion on Vivaldi?
Damn advertisers are finally gonna realize how fucking lonely I am is keeping me from being a better consumer and has me resenting capitalism and they'll work to change my sad life, right?
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, isolate the losers. Got it.
FYI, while this is a terrible move, it does not allow advertisers to see your browsing history like you said. Google looks into your history, the advertiser gives them ads and Google serves the ads to the users they think will like it. The advertiser never sees any of your data. Ironically, Google's advertising system is the safest compared to systems like Meta's.
My ad " you like thick women, Stoicism and band tees? well do we have a goth girl for you, limited item sold, not responsible for broken car windows or torched house, all purchases are final.
Someone needs to make an extension that googles random stuff all the time and floods ones history with so much background noise that the history becomes useless.
I've mostly been using the chromium-based Brave Browser which is Chrome without the advertising engine plus a built-in adblocker. Requires going through the settings once to enable that. There's a very decent android-only browser that does much the same, called Bromite. (Brave has a mobile version but Bromite is developed from scratch for Android, and is stable & supported).
I see a lot of people mentioning that you should just switch to Firefox, but if you're doing that because of privacy, you will not be off that much better by doing just that - unless you fiddle with the settings and get a custom user.js, such as this one, that properly hardens it and a few extenstions, such as Decentraleyes, Cookie Auto Delete or ClearURLs.
But it can get annoying, so instead I'd recommend giving LibreWolf a try. From my experience it works pretty much out of the box, and for the few settings that may be annoying to you they have a quick guide about how to disable them.
But even better than that, I'd recommend giving Mullvad Browser a try. It's basically a clear-net version of Tor Browser, and so far I haven't heard anything negative about them. I also really like their idea about pairing a VPN service (that's optional) with a browser, so now you have exactly the same browser fingerprint as any other user using the same VPN (as long as you don't add any extensions), which will make you more resistant even to the more advanced fingerprinting techniques, since there's basically no way how to tell all of the users of the VPN apart. Some more info and reasoning, along with more recommendations, can be found at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#mullvad-browser
I've recently started using Mullvad, and was using LibreWolf as my daily browser, so now I'm switching between them randomly. I do run into issued from time to time, mostly because of 3rd party requests or auto-deleted cookies when leaving a domain, which can break some kind of cross-site flows. But whenever there's an issue, I just quickly fire up Brave to do that one task. But all things considered it's an amazing experience, so I do recommend giving some of them a try.