201–210 of 216 posts
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Privacy has been Apple's thing the last few years though, very unlike that they implement FLoC.
iOS ads use a system very similar for FLoC though. It's unlikely they'll implement it, but not because of privacy reasons.
Vivaldi and Brave both have built-in ad blockers. FLoC is a feature specifically designed to support advertising. Regardless of the privacy qualities of FLoC, it would be kind of pointless in these browsers anyway? (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
FLoC would be pointless on Chrome as well if people use ad blockers on them. They should get an option to allow/deny the component.
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I wonder if that's because there's no short way to describe FLoC in a way that makes it sound bad for users. They'd need one paragraph to introduce FLoC, then another three making nuanced arguments about how it's actually worse than the status quo, and only then could they get to the core post about not supporting it. Better to avoid that fire and just let the reader infer FLoC is bad, whatever it is.
FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. That wasn't hard.
> That wasn't hard.
It also doesn't explain why that's worse than the current practice of directly identifying individuals. Which is the hard bit.
The article links to FLoC[0] but the site gives me a 404. I used Google, a popular web search engine, to discover what FLoC stands for[1]. > Federated Learning of Cohorts > a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers [0] https://blog.g…
Don't take this the wrong way, but did you really need to explain what Google (Search) is?
Recent related threads: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26765084 - April 2021 (335 comments) Am I FLoCed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313 - April 2021 (33 comments) Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344013 - March 2021 (348 comments) I know there have been others - if anyone finds them, I'll add to the above list.
There's also the EFF website, "Am I FLoCed?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313 - April 2021 (33 comments, 144 points)
I want to write software to let the community build these lists. Doing things like this is good practice for figuring out how the software can work.
Recent related threads: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26765084 - April 2021 (335 comments) Am I FLoCed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313 - April 2021 (33 comments) Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344013 - March 2021 (348 comments) I know there have been others - if anyone finds them, I'll add to the above list.
A bit off topic but I'd love to see a sort of ML/AI feature where "related discussions" can be added automatically for added context, I appreciate you do this manually and I find it very useful to get more of an idea of the relevance/importance of a topic! (Maybe even a "HN search found 3 possibly related threads")
For sure we want to get beyond "mods do it manually" as the strategy. I'm not averse to trying out an ML/AI approach—the nice thing is that all the relevant data is public, so anyone could build it and we could all try it out. But my personal inclination is to build something that would rely more on the community.
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No, this isn't correct. You only ever belong to a single FloC. So let's for a second assume the non-adversarial use case. The advertiser isn't using any additional tools to track you. Then the only thing the advertiser has is your FloC. This doesn't identify you individually, but it might correlate with various interests. If your FloC changes, which it will periodically, the advertiser doesn't have any history, so th…
Instead of fingerprinting out of millions of browser users a company now just has to have a rather small set (Floc) + old school finger printing to 100% uniquely identify a user. I wonder how this feature even passed an internal Google privacy sniff test...
A company can already fingerprint you with 100% certainty with a third party cookie. The idea is to replace those with FLoC. It's at worst a lateral move, and usually an improvement.
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It's not the same as third party cookies! Third party cookies works only if: a) every site you visit loads some Google/Facebook/whatever JavaScript to track you. That are not all sites. b) you didn't disable these scripts with extensions like UBlock (that to me is essentials these days) or use a browser that value your privacy (like Firefox) that blocks them by default. This system not only is deeply integrated in th…
> a) every site you visit loads some Google/Facebook/whatever JavaScript to track you. That are not all sites. Right, but it is, to a first approximation, all of the sites that are going to be showing you personalized ads. > Another bad thing about this system is that is integrated inside the browser, meaning that for a closed source browser like Chrome only Google knows how it works and what exactly it does. While c…
afaik you cannot disable floc with an addon and you do not have any control over the floc id is assigned to you.. the floc id is calculated once a week based on the sites you visit on the previous 1 week.. so it leak information of what sites you have being visiting if anyone is able to reverse the sites that generated that floc id even if the site does not have adds or social media button on then or you use add blockers..
and i bet all the major tracking players will have farms calculating all possible floc ids from all the popular sites..
maybe do an addon that load randon stuff from randon domains in the background to taint the floc id so it makes harder to reverse the actual sites you are visiting.. or just use an browser that does not have it..
but beside floc, browser fingerprinting already allow tracker to identify people almost uniquely even without using cookies, there is already work on how to fingerprint someone without using either cookies or client side scripts, just by analyzing the timing when accessing several random subdomains using hundreds of redirects..
floc is just one more info they will have on you with no added benefit..
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I'll take a stab. Suppose your browser told every website you visited that you had the identifier "FAANG", and your friends web browser told every website they visited: "FAA_G" (b/c obviously they don't have netflix). Per the linked article, the browser is filling in the blanks "___N_" as you visit each website, but it's telling each website not _what_ site you visited, but that you are in the groups of "FAA_G" vs. "…
> but those group segregations are not coming from particular "networks of websites", but instead from the browser itself. Wait, I thought the whole point was that third parties could define what a "cohort" is, and the browser would handle determining whether or not you belong in them?
and it will include all sites from the last week, whatever you used adblocker to prevent tracking or if the site did not had any social media buttons that would allow then to track you there in the first place..
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FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. That wasn't hard.
>FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. > That wasn't hard. It also doesn't explain why that's worse than the current practice of directly identifying individuals. Whic…
they will still be able to identify you individually.. floc actually might make it easier by first assigning you to group of just a few thousands other people.. that mean they just need a few extra bits of fingerprinting to identify you uniquely from there..
also previously they could only track were you had being if there was an ad in that page or if it had a social media button basically they could store a cookie or run a script in a specific context of a specific site and now they knew you visited that site..
now with floc they can track you everywhere, even sites that do not have ads or buttons will be included when calculating your floc..