> The tracking ID sent to DoubleClick could be used to target groups of people, such as "people who rarely update their browser".
The hash sent to the various google websites when you make requests to them is determined by chrome/chromium on the client side, at approximately installation time. So this would require the RNG thats sitting in a publicly auditable source repository to be flawed and abusable in such a way that chrome could bias the hash based on various system attributes that we're just going to assume for the sake of argument are correlated with various ad demographics.
> Shifting the goalposts to "well we don't abuse it" is classic gaslighting.
I never shifted the goalposts. You just did. Please don't accuse me of gaslighting you when you're the one changing your argument.
> Why should I trust an advertising network with a hard-coded, impossible to disable, opaque tracking backdoor in the first place?
If you don't want to personally, that's fine. But don't presume to get no criticism when you accuse any person or group of actively lying based on literally no evidence.
> No other browser is doing this. Why does Google need to send such tracking information to DoubleClick? You cannot justify it without also explaining why Safari and Firefox don't need this.
There's a difference between "want" and "think it's the best decision". I'm certain there are people at both Apple and Mozilla who would prefer to have more robust client side analytics. I have no doubt about that. But whether they think that's worth the perceived loss of privacy is another question. Right now, Firefox has a comparative advantage with certain types of privacy conscious users. Why throw that away? The increase in development speed may not be worth the loss of user trust. And that's okay, but using that to then imply that Google is lying about things, again based on no evidence.
Let me put it this way: I trust Google (obviously), and so I'm fine to take them at their word that they aren't using this for ad targeting.
Someone who didn't trust Google could reasonably say "I don't put much faith in Google's press release", but without any other evidence that there's actually any targeting happening, the most you could reasonably say is that they might be.
You're taking an even more extreme position that given the opportunity to do a nefarious thing, Google must be doing it. Despite other reasonable explanations existing. This is a weird position to take and I don't get it.