51–60 of 352 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
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 it…
If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
where is the better part? is it the fact that this makes fingerprinting easier? or that floc makes more data available to advertisers than cookies?
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 it…
There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms.
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Why would the cohort membership change frequently? Isn't it based on your browsing habits? I don't think my habits change frequently—do most people's? Also, even if I take for granted that everyone's cohort changes daily, how does that imply anonymity? Like say my habit is that I check emails a ton on Monday, go on YouTube on Saturday, read the news on Sunday, etc... so my habits are changing daily, okay, but not wee…
Cohorts cannot be too small (or they are not published), nor too big (or they are not particularly useful for capturing a particular set of behaviors/interests). The algorithm will balance these two constraints which will lead to any individuals coming in and out of particular cohorts. The semantic meaning of a cohort will likely change over time as well. For that, FLoC is proposing adding version IDs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an unwanted feature.
How long until the list of patches to backport for every new version of Chromium becomes so large that they have to pick and choose which one to keep maintaining and which one to give up on? If tomorrow Google decides to push a very deep change to the way, say, extensions are handled that makes them less effective at ad blocking, will Brave accept the burden to suddenly have to maintain a very deep fork of the browser in order to maintain old functionality?
I'm effectively FUDing right now, but my concern is genuine. I'm very perplex that you can make an effectively anti-ad, pro-privacy browser based on the source code of one of the biggest ad companies in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
Preach. I don't consent to tracking. I don't want my browser helping anyone track me in any way. I don't want to be pressured and manipulated into buying things I don't need. Advertising is not moral and I owe nothing to anyone who tries to manipulate me. Websites can move to more efficient and lighter methods of delivery to cover the absence of advertising revenue. Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industr…
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 it…
If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
It says it's about respecting the privacy of users better but in practice it fails very bad at doing so the only thing it archives is allowing Google to disable cookie based tracking and with that makes it harder for 3rd party trackers to be google independent (it not harder for 3rd party trackers if they use/abuse the FLoC Id and generay there are many ways to track users which are not cookie based so especially when it comes to the very bad offender of invasive tracking it doesn't make a difference or becomes even easier, but some of the smaller google ad (and analytic) alternatives will have it harder).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
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 it…
I would expect that it's practical to reverse engineer the cohorts into a browsing history. This means that an interested party could derive browsing information from a page visit rather than needing to instrument thousands of websites with cookies. There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms.
> There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms.
With ~33k cohorts, there is literally a hard bound of just above 15 bits per visit. That's still theoretically a lot if you have some other stable identifier, but practically speaking most users on most sites will have an identical cohort and it will drop off rapidly as cohorts stabilize into groups appropriate for ad targeting.
Barring the other considerations I've mentioned in the comments here, that's still immeasurably better for individual privacy than ~infinite bits per visit from stable third-party cookies.