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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#4

Post by geofft »

riq_ wrote: post #2

care to explain what is Brave and what is FLoC?

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) :

> Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators along with the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they earned.

Quoting https://amifloced.org/ :

> Third-party cookies are the technology that powers much of the surveillance-advertising business today. But cookies are on their way out, and Google is trying to design a way for advertisers to keep targeting users based on their web browsing once cookies are gone. It's come up with FLoC.

> FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#5

Post by mcrittenden »

riq_ wrote: post #2

care to explain what is Brave and what is FLoC?

Brave [0] is a web browser, built from Chromium, but with built in ad and tracker blocking.

FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. The third party cookie is dying, and FLoC is a way for companies to group people together and track them, rather than tracking individuals. Here's more info about that [1] and here's an EFF article about why it's dangerous [2].

[0] https://brave.com/ [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#7

Post by mcint »

FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts which aims to target advertising better without it directly relying on singularly personal information.

https://web.dev/floc/

  FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users.

  FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection.

  As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else.
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#9

Post by _eLRIC »

riq_ wrote: post #2

care to explain what is Brave and what is FLoC?

Brave claims to be a privacy oriented web browser. It is apparently based on Chromium and someone identified a Chromium feature that was phoning home (I.e. Google servers) with some informations reducing user anonimity (At least that's what I understood from a quick look)
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