The recursive irony here is that Alphabet implemented FLoC to put a moat around tracking adtech, and Brave consumes Chromium for its own means of generating revenue from vending a browser (BAT), so of course there’s no reason to propagate FLoC.
I don't understand why tracking is not being considered as mechanism helping companies to manipulate consumers into buying their stuff, essentially amounting to fraud? If you were going to track someone in real life and manipulating them into buying something, you would certainly end up in jail, so why is this allowed over the internet? Because consumers don't see companies who stalk them? In my opinion the whole tra…
Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
121–130 of 352 posts
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#122I think there should be an option where you either pay for content you consume on the web or targeted (aka efficient) advertising pays for it. All I care about is my PII information not to leak and be accessible to random people.
I don't see any other way and I can't see what these people at EFF are arguing for? It's easy to just keep saying no to everything.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#123Earlier 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…
> Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. I don't want to be rude, but won't they just end up losing their livelihoods? If the advertising industry goes, most programmers will see their salaries drop hugely. Even those not working in advertising will see a drop due to the flood of supply.
This sounds suspiciously like the argument that coal mining should continue so as to preserve coal-miner jobs.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#124Earlier 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...
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.
Not every web page has an associated strong commercial intent. Most sites, quality sites, would lose out to commerical junk sites if only commercial sites could make money from ads.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#125That'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…
I'm curious about the value of maintaining something like this verses using Firefox.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#126Earlier 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…
Honestly I have no problems with ad's
While I have no problem with the concept itself of advertising, I do have a problem with modern implementations of ads. Almost invariably, they are loud (vocally and visually), intrusive, obnoxious and almost coercive in their use of language. They are intended to dumb down the target audience, rather than enrich their targets' lives.
I do have a problem with everything that attacks my ability to think freely.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that those aren't offered up to every website you visit.
Very thin distinction here given that they can still be purchased by advertisers and Apple has every interest in being the only company monetizing on their platform so the number of parties seeing this is irrelevant if the point was the surveillance problem.
'Ads you see on the App store or Apple News' and 'ads on the the entire web' is very substantial distinction, as is the scope of the surveillance involved. Another one big one is - you can turn the Apple thing off.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#128Earlier 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…
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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#129What is wrong with FloC and what's a better alternative?
Your question assumes that transparent, behavior-based, cross-site user interest tracking is somehow essential functionality for the web and we just have to find the right way to do it.
I think most people who are criticizing FLoC would challenge the idea that this class of functionality needs to or should exist at all.
Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
#130FLoC 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 prefer irrelevant ads because I learn about new things outside of my bubble.
Who knew that ship designers could buy special plugins for CAD environments? Even though I could have guessed it (In fact, I made this example up), it’s still fun and interesting to be surprised.