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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#181

Post by catlifeonmars »

craftinator wrote: post #162
petters wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been true for me. I have discovered interesting things in Facebook ads that I would not have discovered and bought otherwise. (They were obscure Kickstarter projects)

> I have discovered interesting things in Facebook ads that I would not have discovered and bought otherwise. I've never had this experience, between Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Every "targeted" ad I've been exposed to has either been for something I already have, or for something that's insufficient to my needs. Because of this, and because I dislike the invasiveness and anti-privacy of modern advertising, I start…

That seems counterproductive. You will be worse off by using irrelevant data in evaluating the choice of a particular product, and the company that paid for the advertisement likely won’t even miss your sale.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#182

Post by dialtone »

xvector wrote: post #74
dialtone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use FLoC ID for fingerprinting, it changes continuously.

"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…

The second paragraph you quote is literally the counter example of what I just said.

There needs to exist a way to identify you in other ways and in the future cookies won't be one of those. So a site that has your information because you shared it with them will be able to see your cohort changing, otherwise you'll look like a new user each time.

And yeah I'm extremely familiar with FLoC, more so than the EFF.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#183

Post by dialtone »

Sephr wrote: post #136
dialtone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use FLoC ID for fingerprinting, it changes continuously.

I wouldn't entirely agree. It doesn't change often enough, leading to easy fingerprinting scenarios[1]. 1. https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/4

The link you posted examines the issue in detail, IP address on its own is already on its own a decent identifier at the household level, and used today, and that's why there is a specification on Willful IP Blindness proposed by Google.

But IP alone is imperfect as well anyway for tracking.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#185

Post by gerash »

bww wrote: post #129
gerash wrote: post #113

What 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.

Content creators want to get paid as much as anyone else and it's either through direct payment by the consumers or by embedding advertisement in their content.

All this FloC, third party cookies, etc. are efforts to make that advertisement route more efficient. So my question is what are the critics proposing instead? Get rid of ads and just ask the audience to pay per view or make everything a subscription? Not paying content creators (ad blocking) is certainly not a sustainable alternative.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#186

Post by betterunix2 »

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.

That is a pretty poor argument. There has never been any guarantee that ads will be rendered, and users rapidly learn to ignore areas of the screen where ads typically appear (I have seen user studies to this effect). "Reader mode" will basically prevent ads from being rendered, unless the ads are purely text and are inlined with the main text of the page. Calling ad blockers "theft" is as ridiculous as calling ads themselves "theft" -- after all, the ad companies are using a large fraction of the bandwidth users paid for, and the CPU cycles and electricity on their computers, without having been asked to do so and without having asked permission.

If websites really find that ad blockers are killing their revenue, they will switch to a paywall model, and maybe micropayments will finally happen (or perhaps a service that allows users to subscribe to large numbers of websites at a time). Whether or not that is a good thing depends on who you ask.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#187

Post by vbezhenar »

type0 wrote: post #145
yunohn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally a cohort ID? Where did you get “hands them your browsing history on a silver platter” from?

because combined with browser fingerprinting it is exactly the outcome

https://amiunique.org/

"Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset."

Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#188

Post by gsich »

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.

No.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#189

Post by stjohnswarts »

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 targeted, obnoxious ads

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#190

Post by codezero »

yholio wrote: post #173

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…

I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google.

I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet.

USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue

All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform.

The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.

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