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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#251

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

nickysielicki wrote: post #250
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…

All it would take is one multimillionaire/billionaire to look at philanthropy through a different lens for this to become a reality. What we need is a social movement with funding for Adblock work and outreach. The entire advertising industry is a house of cards waiting to fall. Someone with a grudge and the money to back such a movement could singlehandedly wipe out the revenue of places like Google, Facebook, and m…

C'mon, Bill.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#252

Post by hardwaresofton »

How this is actually going to go -- people will find out in x months/years that it's fairly easy to create a cohort of 1, if you do enough filtering. The only issue is that now it's ostensibly outside of the scope of GDPR.

It's already happened with facebook targeting[0], imagine how much more specific the information at Google is.

[0]: https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#253

Post by krisdol »

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…

This is called contextual advertising, fyi.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#255

Post by travisgriggs »

guywhocodes wrote: post #239
travisgriggs wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe I'm being naive; I work with some peers who smoke habitually. They pay a hefty tax for their habit. I don't really see the government's incentive to keep them at it to collect more taxes happening. Is it super sneaky and I just don't see it?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#256

Post by forgotmypw17 »

quotemstr wrote: post #137

Disabling FLoC is reactionary, performative, and honestly, counterproductive. Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win." Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!"

>Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win."

(Actually does nothing or the sort, continues tracking users while making user experience even worse and some crucial Web features unusable for indie devs.)

>Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!"

(Pushes "ad industry" out of the way and performs its own tracking and ads.)

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#257

Post by smsm42 »

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…

There's nothing wrong with advertisement, but adtech on the internet turned malignant years ago. It's one thing showing me a banner or short text, another to stalk me all over the net, keep all surveillance data forever, and bombard me with megabytes of useless trash each time I want to see some site. The difference between normal advertising and what we have now is the difference between healthy cells and cancer. Instead of taking their part in the ecosystem, they are destroying it.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#258

Post by KirillPanov »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #220
jefftk wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they’re the only ones who can use FLOC It is available to everyone: cohort = await document.interestCohort(); See https://github.com/WICG/floc (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Great news. So how to I create my own set of cohorts?

...crickets...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#259

Post by freebuju »

anonwebguy wrote: post #216

I'm going to be that guy tonight. I never post online. I don't see value in posting online. But I feel as if I have to weight in on this conversation. I run an online business. I depend on ads. I hate being tracked. Here's the deal, Google is tracking you no matter what. Even if they aren't using your information for advertising, you still feed them all the best first party data in the world. You give them your searc…

Privacy or any other illusion of it on the internet, is mostly a game of musical chairs. If it's not GAFAM getting your data, it's 3 letter agencies. Or worse, both.

True anonymity has no place on the clearnet. The sooner we come into acceptance with this fact, the better we'll be able to protect ourselves from this rigged game. [0]

Tor is the only place you can go to find anonymity. I agree, if your goal is not to be tracked, by any of the above adversaries, go offline. We tend to laugh at guys who attempt this and call them looney, but it won't be so funny in the not-so-far-away future given how communication tech is advancing at such a fast pace with things such as 5G and IoT. It's easy to see governments achieve total surveillance within the next half-century.

I also agree that not enough spotlight is shone on government's ability to coerce tech companies to hand over user data, whether live monitored or subpoena'd. These tech companies like to play-act all tough e.g Apple, but the reality is they apply for business licenses & other similar considerations from the govt. It wouldn't be far-fetched to deduce such favors esp ones that come with competitive advantage in an industry come with hidden strings attached. Am not surprised to see govts such as UK's brazenly attempt to put backdoors into encryption technologies. [1]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/02/capitol... (LONG READ ALERT)

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/uk-trying-to-stop-facebook-end-t...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#260

Post by yholio »

cookiengineer wrote: post #235
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 th…

This cannot happen on an individual level. We need to take the internet standards writing process back into the hands of citizenry. The hacker ethos is long dead and all technical bodies have become negotiating tables where giant corporations divvy up their turf.
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