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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#171

Post by julianlam »

furbyhater wrote: post #94
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…

The idea of a fork is that it is independent from what it was forked from, you pull what you like and leave aside negative changes, if the license allows this. At least that's the idea. Of course companies with huge manpower such as google can evolve "standards" in a pace that a small independent fork can't keep pace, but we shouldn't just give up.

I think the type of fork that OC was referring to would be a project that forks to provide a change in feature set, yet still tries to remain up to date with upstream. So, not a hard fork.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#172

Post by adamsvystun »

While FLoC does sound like a bad idea, I think it would be helpful if critistism was coupled with counter proposals. What do the critics see as ideal solution here: making all of the free services paid? having just more content-based ads? or something different?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#173

Post by yholio »

Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and MAC addresses to user agents, referers and canvas leaks?

But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#174

Post by sebastien_b »

lupire wrote: post #117
kmbfjr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're under no obligation to visit a site without sending a payment either.

And websites are under no obligation to serve up pages without prior payment from visitors.

We could all go around in circles like this for hours.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#175

Post by btian »

adamsvystun wrote: post #172

While FLoC does sound like a bad idea, I think it would be helpful if critistism was coupled with counter proposals. What do the critics see as ideal solution here: making all of the free services paid? having just more content-based ads? or something different?

Given the context is Brave, their alternative is attention token

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#176

Post by mikl »

quotemstr wrote: post #148
lucasyvas wrote: post #95

Seeing: document.interestCohort is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.

Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway. Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.

> killing advertising itself

We had advertising before invasive tracking. The ad business can survive without tracking, they just don’t want to.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#177

Post by stjohnswarts »

londons_explore wrote: post #35
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.

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.

Well then stop tracking me around the internet and then we'll talk. Ads used to just be 1 direction. Give up the feedback path and I'll be fine as long as I don't get 5 pop ups blocking the article I'm trying to read and THEN fingerprint me and follow me to the next website.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#178

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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…

What a piece of flaming poop.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#179

Post by dialtone »

pvg wrote: post #127
dialtone wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a pretty naive argument and distinction as well.

It's pretty obvious Apple doesn't have financially valuable properties on the web but they have plenty in their application ecosystem.

In Apple's view Apple News is how people consume news, not go to the web where the user experience isn't custom tailored by Apple. Apple News is barely different than Google AMP that everyone rages against, try to get someone to share a link to a piece of news from Apple News and it will come with the ask to subscribe or download it.

So in Apple's ideal plan almost every place where today ads are displayed will be inside Apple News.

And hey, I wasn't aware there exist another App Store where people can buy applications or in-app purchases on iOS.

And yeah you can turn FLoC off too both today and when it will be in production.

Lastly, when did the argument move from "advertising bad, tracking data always bad, targeted advertising terrible" to "if Apple does it then I'm good with it"?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#180

Post by dialtone »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #93
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…

> FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. Nevertheless it seems a formidable addition to a browser user fingerprint.

Once again that's not how fingerprinting works... This thing changes all the time so not sure what fingerprint it can generate.
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