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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#231

Post by dialtone »

pvg wrote: post #211
dialtone wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

pretty naive argument and distinction as well. 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"? It'd be a lot cooler if you could respond to my actual argument without namecalling and putting words in my mouth. For one thing, it's rude; for another, it doesn't contain much of a counter-argument. You said the distinc…

I replied. You are considering Apple's system better despite the fact that Apple's goal is to re create the web environment in their own apps so they can monetize it in their platform.

So your argument is maybe valid (I don't think so, tracking is tracking and this isn't just contextual targeting) only now, as time goes by and Apple accumulates more power your argument is back to being invalid again.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#232

Post by hackerfromthefu »

braney1 wrote: post #159

The ecosystem is broken, add work but many products have marketing costs built into them that are over 30% of what you pay for, in some cases, over 50% of your monthly fees are marketing expenses. In fact, in SaaS software, a world class company spends 33% (3:1 CAC ratio) on sales and marketing. I don’t mind ads or even having embedded marketing costs in the products I buy, what frustrates me is how long and hard I h…

Yes it's just exploiting both sellers and users. The market power is broken. Google needs to be broken up, and advertising and general web browsing needs to be completely non-identifiable, or our civilisation is heading to a micromanaged dystopia of stalinesque proportions.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#233

Post by hackerfromthefu »

gerash wrote: post #185
bww wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pay…

Simple advertisements like billboards. One image, no stalker tracking, no global user profiles, no malware, and no animation or movement.

Advertising was effective as an image or text that shows the reader a value proposition. What we have these days is stalkers and information rapists pretending to be advertisers.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#234

Post by danielheath »

TravisLS wrote: post #227
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…

One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital b…

Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right?

That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#235

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

Shouting is easy, doing so isn't.

I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream.

Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting the Content-Security-Policy headers for all domains. If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. Quite literally.

That's the reason why I kinda started to build my own browser (without a rendering engine for now) that focusses on filtering, parsing, and peer-to-peer offloading traffic and sees itself as a mixture between web browser, scraper and proxy that can be used as a cache for others. It has the idea to act as a web filter service + a webview to render its UI rather than being a render engine and document engine. [1]

I hope that with this market niche there's a way to make this kind of effort sustainable for the future, because all other web browser fork projects I've seen so far are dying off due to no funding and too much work to maintain the codebase.

It's just not feasible to compete in the everday user's browser market. Lots of companies have tried, and lots of companies have failed.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

Edit: Clarification of Chrome vs. libchromium

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#236

Post by minitech »

quotemstr wrote: post #158
o_p wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingerprinting is hardly just advertising.

Then fix fingerprinting. "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.

> Then fix fingerprinting.

Yeah, working on it.

> "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.

It isn’t though.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#237

Post by minitech »

dialtone wrote: post #182
xvector wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> So a site that has your information because you shared it with them will be able to see your cohort changing

this itself is already unwanted

> otherwise you'll look like a new user each time.

but you won’t, because the existence of a non-fingerprinting-based solution isn’t going to stop fingerprinting.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#238

Post by dillondoyle »

roody15 wrote: post #225
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…

The issue with FLoC is it based on a false premise. Advertising can be successful without needing to build a tracking profile on a person as they traverse multiple websites. For example if I visit a website that follows trends in computer hardware... advertisers may pay to put ads in this site to PC parts, etc. If I visit a site about popular camping locations.. advertisers can purchase ads that are relevant to campi…

That retargeting goes away with many of the changes that are being pushed

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#239

Post by guywhocodes »

travisgriggs wrote: post #228
codezero wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Tel…

> 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. I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?

The problem is that if you tax it the government becomes incentivized to increase attention selling.

If the money isn't destroyed you will end up in smaller scale corruption. One example that comes to mind is HK zoning fees and the government's increasing dependency there of.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#240

Post by dialtone »

int_19h wrote: post #132
yunohn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the content creators have no right to demand compensation for creating “what you see“?

They have the right to demand compensation, but the appropriate way to do that is to gatekeep - i.e. don't provide access until the user pays (or promises to pay). When they serve content with ads, they are not demanding anything.

The Open Internet for the Rich that we all envisioned.
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