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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#101

Post by Ntrails »

dathinab wrote: post #70
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.

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 learn…

If you could give me a world in which ads were always static images with a link behind them and nothing more. Where they never move, never pop, never animate, never play sounds or video, never run scripts etc etc...

Yeah, in that world, ads would be ok with me. Sure they're pointless because I won't click on them - but not really worse than having a blank spot in the page because of an ad blocker.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#102

Post by rewq4321 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #65
jshen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Lets not pretend that ads help people with less money.

Who's pretending? Ads naturally and quite effectively price-discriminate, and so they do make internet content cheaper for people with less money.

You may have problems with excessive consumption, but many people in developing countries do not. They desperately need the free content (educational, informative, and otherwise) that the current internet model provides them.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#103

Post by lxgr »

13415 wrote: post #59
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.

On the contrary, the websites who display ads steal screen space on my machine without paying me for it, some of them even steal computing time by running unauthorized scripts.

By the same argument you are stealing the website‘s bandwidth by visiting it without clicking on the ads.

These reductionist approaches don‘t really help with understanding ads (and communication in general).

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#104

Post by heavyset_go »

dataflow wrote: post #11

Is there any evidence behind the idea that FLoC is more privacy-preserving than third-party cookies? Intuitively that is not obvious to me at all, especially given there are so many other fingerprinting techniques it could be combined with.

FLoC is essentially something Google can point at and say "Shut up about privacy, at least we aren't tracking you the same way as before!"

It's only being introduced because they're afraid of regulation.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#105

Post by Vinnl »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
mcint wrote: post #7

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...

> I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads.

This sounded good when I first heard it, but by now I understand 'relevant' to mean 'tailored to optimally influence my behaviour', eg showing me articles about the futility of voting if my political preferences are likely to lean a particular way.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#106

Post by heavyset_go »

sergiotapia wrote: post #96

I will never feel bad about using adblock. The sites can die for all I care, I'll just use something else. Will never tolerate ads, ever.

What's really telling is how many people and companies think they're entitled to running ads on my computers and phones, as if I'm the one who is doing something wrong by choosing what I see or don't see.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#107

Post by matkoniecz »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
mcint wrote: post #7

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...

I strictly prefer irrelevant ads less likely to influence me.

I really have enough projects, TODO lists, interesting things to buy to last for lifetime of 250 years.

Why I would want ads likely to influence me? There is basically no chance that ad will show me useful, worth using object or service to buy that I would not discover anyway.

It would be just another scam more effectively targeting me.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#108

Post by kmbfjr »

jeffgreco wrote: post #79
HeckFeck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would respect the Adblock crowd more if they didn’t run around describing their actions as brave or “morally responsible.” It’s ok to admit that you’re taking something without return!

As if you have never run to the bathroom during a commercial break.

No one is under any obligation to accept advertising. Only since the modern web have advertisers and content providers made this an argument on ethics.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#109

Post by throwawayboise »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
mcint wrote: post #7

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...

If ads are relevant to the content of the current page, no user profiling (even pseudo-anonymously) is necessary. To me that would be the best option.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#110

Post by matkoniecz »

judge2020 wrote: post #40
mikl wrote: post #23

Good to see Brave sticking to their privacy guns. FLoC is a brazen attempt for Big Ad (aka. Google and its ilk) to keep their spying-on-users gravy train going, now that GDPR and similar laws are making their old methods illegal (without consent). No one wants to consent to being spied on, so FLoC is circumnavigating the GDPR consent requirements, letting them spy on all Chrome-users without consent.

Except with FLOC you can watch your network connection in/out and see that, instead of a persistent identifier being used to track you, you only send your interest categories. FLOC's intent is to keep their money making operation afloat, but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users.

> you only send your interest categories

Not sure why it is supposed to be significant improvement.

"FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However [a tracker now] only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million). In information theoretic terms, FLoC cohorts will contain several bits of entropy—up to 8 bits, in Google’s proof of concept trial. This information is even more potent given that it is unlikely to be correlated with other information that the browser exposes. This will make it much easier for trackers to put together a unique fingerprint for FLoC users."

"as your FLoC cohort will update over time, sites that can identify you in other ways will also be able to track how your browsing changes [...] a FLoC cohort is nothing more, and nothing less, than a summary of your recent browsing activity."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

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