The way I see it, Google knows that changes are coming to the advertising industry, either through regulations or just public opinion. By doing this now, they can try to get ahead of those changes/criticisms while controlling what systems their advertising competitors will have to operate under. I don’t doubt that Google will still have enough data to do relevant advertising, either with the data from these new systems in the browser or the first-party data they have on people through their sites.
The way I see it, Google knows that changes are coming to the advertising industry, either through regulations or just public opinion. By doing this now, they can try to get ahead of those changes/criticisms while controlling what systems their advertising competitors will have to operate under. I don’t doubt that Google will still have enough data to do relevant advertising, either with the data from these new systems in the browser or the first-party data they have on people through their sites.