I'm quite happy to continue saying "advertising is bad, tracking is bad, anything that serves no purpose other than to help them is bad for users". Calling that "black and white thinking" is not an argument that advertising is good, or tracking is good, or that this API proposal is good.
What is the reason this is good for users? It's not "this is better than other tracking", because this does nothing to take away other tracking so it's not an either-or. Other tracking won't go away until it's blocked. There is no requirement to provide a replacement.
"We've should eliminate toxic waste being dumped in the water!" "What do you propose to replace the toxic wastewith? Why don't we provide a less toxic waste? Maybe if we offer the option of dumping a less toxic waste, that'll incentivize factories to dump that instead of the more toxic waste?"
> Calling that "black and white thinking" is not an argument that advertising is good
I never said this proposal is any good. I don't know if is as I just looked at the general overview, and that's not really enough to make a judgement one way or the other. As a general point I do think it's a problem with solving.
What I am saying your case for "it's bad" is entirely without substance and seems to be based on axiomatic black/white thinking.
The substance of my case is "this won't work, this provides no value to users, this is disclosing a non-zero number of bits of information about users, and this is nothing but attack surface area for potential information disclosure".
Once you have a non-zero number of bits flowing from the browser to advertisers, that's a path to try to extract more bits of identifying information than the browser intended to provide, by any number of means.
There will be lots of people trying to deanonymize users from the data. There will be warrants served to the intermediary. There will be attempted security breaches on the intermediary. Those are just a few bits of potential attack surface, all of which is entirely unnecessary.
> I'm quite happy to continue saying "advertising is bad, tracking is bad, anything that serves no purpose other than to help them is bad for users". Calling that "black and white thinking" is not an argument that advertising is good, or tracking is good, or that this API proposal is good.
GP was very clear in what he considered "black and white thinking" and you very clearly avoided addressing what GP wrote.
> What is the reason this is good for users?
Did GP said it was good, no. So why are you even asking this question?
And of course the data is useful. That's why this is being done. That in itself is not a argument against it.