Funwayguy

If you don’t use the VPN for normal things then you leave yourself open to indentification by correlation. It’s the same rule for naive Tor users. The more normal and distributed it appears in traffic, the harder it is to correlate other pieces of data they they already have access to.

See that’s the fun part. Google is the ad company so it’s all 1st party data. Google can package the Trojan horse however they please, which why it’s such a fine line for the blockers to walk.

It wouldn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Put simply, Google can continue indirectly punishing creators for tolerating adblockers then redirect blame, even though they could have easily separated the metrics from the advertising and telemetry endpoints that blockers filtered. This way they get their money either from unblocked ads or from creator’s reduced view counts, win-win for Google.

As an added bonus for Google, by ensuring view metrics get fucked up, it double punishes creators featuring sponsored content that rely on those metrics to determine how much the sponsor should pay them. Meanwhile Google could, in theory, sell ad placements attached to their own internal metrics that differ from the affected ones publicly visible.