But either way, your initial statement assumes that ads will only be interesting to you if your browsing habits are tracked across the internet. There’s another option: if you visit sites that are focused on GPUs they can advertise GPUs to you. This is the way advertising worked from 1700-2000.
From 2000-2010 you had site/search based adverts
From 2010-2020 you had tracking based adverts
I can't think of even 1 time I've seen a useful advert though
And almost without exception, those were relevant ads, not targeted.
Relevant like getting a coupon code for digital ocean storage credits below an article on how to run your own IPFS host.
Or relevant like getting an offer for pizzafriday on the 'where to eat' information section of a campsite in some unfamiliar city.
Maybe on both sites you get shown ads for coca cola or a car.
None of those require building up a profile that tracks your personal browsing habits across the entire internet and is simply targeting your customers where they are.
It's all about some random company building a detailed file on your person.
If you have trouble understanding it's an issue, imagine all physical businesses - restaurants, shops, taxis, barber shops, hospitals, postal service - recording all your visits, mugshots and all, and forwarding them to Moms Friendly Robots company, which knows exactly what you eat, shit, like to fuck and generally predisposed to do. They also sell this info to others, but that's really secondary.
What you are missing is that FLoC is basically a different vaseline flavor and you preferring it over the original is the biggest issue of it all - that, shokingly, you are OK with the rape to begin with.
Its a fucking horrible thing to do to someone, Even if you try to opt out of family and that type of topic you still get them.
Would you be OK with an opt-in solution? If you want to be tracked and get "good" ads you install a browser extension and now you get your ads and now everyone is happy.
I even found my current broker that I do most trades with via targeted advertising, and I'm super happy with it.
Targeted ads of course don't always show perfect companies and products, but they're often a good starting point if I'm looking for a product and I see an ad about it that looks interesting.
That being said, I do try to avoid ads as much as possible, but if I'm gonna see them, for example there's no way to block them on iOS instagram, I'd rather they be targeted than generic.
FLoC seems like a method of saving my preferences locally, which is fine. I'm not interested. I won't use Google's browsers and I'll continue to filter my traffic.
Internet privacy will always be an uphill battle, there's worse things going on, starting with centralized and monopolized DNS, I feel we should focus on fixing that.