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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#61

Post by calvinmorrison »

HeckFeck wrote: post #38
JoshTriplett wrote: post #22

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…

Most cost is producing content, not hosting.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#62

Post by benatkin »

morelisp wrote: post #60
lumost wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cohorts could be reverse-engineered to give you a probability space of browsing history, which would be identical for any user in the cohort given a single sample. > 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,…

Except the privacy conscious just won, so there is no need to compare it to the former status quo. Why squander our victory?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#63

Post by cortesoft »

goalieca wrote: post #39
londons_explore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s been said many times, but if the business model is advertising then you’re the product.. not the quality journalism or content. They’ll focus on generating content to increase engagement instead of perfecting what you think it is they are supposed to deliver. Perhaps it is time for an advertising model to die out as the default.

Ok, then don’t patronize sites supported by ads.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#64

Post by [deleted] »

simias wrote: post #56

That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#65

Post by jay_kyburz »

jshen wrote: post #50
simias wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they'll move on to a more sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling their user's privacy?

A business model that will exclude the poor.

Lets not pretend that ads help people with less money. Ads are designed to manipulate people into buying things they don't need.

They encourage people to believe their self worth is linked to the things they own. That a persons status in society is somehow associated with how much money they have to spend.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#66

Post by sounds »

simias wrote: post #56

That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. 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…

Fortunately, removing a feature and removing code is pretty easy. It's when a feature is added that it requires much more thought and effort.

It's not zero effort, but pretty easy.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#67

Post by HeckFeck »

somethingAlex wrote: post #57
HeckFeck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you mean by "more efficient and lighter methods of delivery?"

Plainer HTML and very little Javascript which will reduce development and running costs. As witness, this very website. It supplies all that is necessary and no more. It is very successful.

With harmful incentives removed, this would encourage websites to focus on good writing and less on being 'content farms' to drive up engagement for the advertisers.

All I want from most sites is the text. Not adverts, trackers and those damnable autoplaying videos that jump out and follow me down the page. I use the reader mode in most cases. Why is it necessary to use reader mode if not to cut the useless cruft? Why can't the web just be like that?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#68

Post by paulryanrogers »

simias wrote: post #56

That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. 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…

My guess is they run the cost benefit analysis with every Chrome release. Then just give up and accept the change unless it's obviously low cost or in an area they've already forked.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#69

Post by nitrogen »

HeckFeck wrote: post #47
londons_explore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not stealing anything by instructing my computer not to run code against my consent. No one is entitled to my CPU time. Least of all are advertisers. Also, the store isn't freakishly stalking me and noting down all my habits whilst sharing what it has collected with its friends, or indeed anyone who will buy the data. Besides, candy is impossible to replicate in the same way that data is. Theft of physical object…

Also, the store isn't freakishly stalking me and noting down all my habits whilst sharing what it has collected with its friends, or indeed anyone who will buy the data.

Many retail stores do, actually, through wireless tracking, cameras, and/or purchase history. They will buy and sell consumer data through the likes of Acxiom.

It would be great to have a ublock equivalent for the physical world.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#70

Post by dathinab »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #22
londons_explore wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.

Honestly I have no problems with ad's as long as it doesn't involve any tracking (or lets call it what it is spying).

If blog or similar can finance part of their cost with Ad's, why not.

Sure on slow internet it's a somewhat different matter.

Anyway Ad's okay, but tracking for me is spying and should be treated like that, i.e. it should be illegal.

There are ways to have personalized ads without it, like local learning which then selects to get an add for a specific topic, with that a side could still track which ads you got, but it would be much less useful as FLoC, and then you add additional steps to even further decrees any chance of tracking.

Companies still get implicit feedback by what adds get selected more then others.

People can explicitly blacklist annoying (or offensive) adds making sure they don't see them ever again and if enough do so in turn making that app not seen much more at all etc. etc.

But the FLoC cohorts are WAY to small/identifiying to not allow you to be tracked fairly easy with it. Just combine it with other identifying aspects of browsers (there are a lot) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's often allows a 100% unique identification.

And given that you likely wont be able to "ad-block" FLoC this makes it way worse then the status quo.

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