> looking for some form of compromise

I think it's kind of important when talking about privacy to keep in mind that the goal shouldn't be to force people to never reveal anything about themselves, it's to give them agency over what they reveal. That gets lost sometimes, I'm often guilty of losing sight of it as well. So a privacy world that makes it impossible for people to connect with each other, or that tells them that they're not allowed to present a certain way online is just as much of a problem as a solution that requires them to do so.

To me, the core idea behind privacy in regards to user tracking is that people should have agency over what their identities are, over what identities they're "allowed" to have, and over where they share those identities and whether those identities are associated with each other. It's totally valid for people to want to be able to tell Google that they're interested in seeing certain ads, they should be able to do that.

And when we expand out from privacy and look at algorithms on sites like Youtube/Twitter, that underlying idea of control becomes a bit more obvious -- it's not that content suggestions are bad, it's the inversion of control over how those suggestions are determined, the requirement that suggestions are constantly being computed and updated based on every action the user takes, the requirement that there be one set of suggestions for each user regardless of context, and the refusal from companies to give users the ability to do anything beyond slightly tweak or retrain their suggestions or to treat personally volunteered preferences as valid or trustworthy compared to what the algorithm determines they should like.

But I do want to get Youtube suggestions for related videos, I just want to be in control over how that happens. I want to be the entity with power in that relationship, I want to be the entity holding onto my data, I don't want to have to trust Google not to abuse me or to ask permission for Google to forget things.

This also gets at the potential benefits of a private world where users have real agency. It's very easy (I'm often guilty of this) to phrase the end goal of privacy as a world where tons of things just go away. But the reality is that targeted ads today mostly kind of stink, and there's a lot of potential for filtering, curation, and community aggregation that we can't take advantage of because users are excluded from the process of determining what they see online and how they're perceived by others. I wish there was more effort to try and describe how a private world could be better for things like search suggestions, user-relevant ads, content filtering -- because in a world where users had control over how this stuff worked and could customize their own experiences, it might be possible to try new applications, share more information, or experiment with new identities without risking abuse.

Imagine a world where you're an LGBTQ+ adjacent teen trying to figure out your own identity, and you temporarily turn on a category related to that for a subset of sites. If there's not a huge danger of fingerprinting, you can see how it feels for sites to recognize that -- maybe to tell Youtube that for right now you'd like to see more videos suggested based on that category. But you can safely do that because you know that other sites won't get that information, and that at any point you can switch the category off with zero consequences. You don't have to ask Google/Youtube for permission to edit what they know about you or to forget a category, you can control it locally right from your browser without asking anyone's permission.

That opens the door for really powerful applications or recommendation engines that arguably couldn't be (morally) built today. It's not about trying to create a world where nobody knows anything about anyone, it's about flipping the power imbalance and inverting the current predominant narrative about how information should be collected online.

With FLoC (and with other privacy initiatives from companies like Facebook), the feeling I get is that Google is trying to convince users that it can be a responsible data steward both because of internal policies and regulations. These companies try to create a narrative that the only options are either they track us, or that we never get anything recommended again. But neither of those options are what I want, what I want is to be my own data steward.