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Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

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Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#251

Post by jakelazaroff »

pdonis wrote: post #222
jakelazaroff wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how exactly charging their users money is a better long term business model for Google than selling their data? If you don’t count the threat of regulation (since you say it won’t solve the issue) I can’t think of a single piece of evidence supporting that. It sounds like your reasoning is “users will eventually wake up!” which I would bet a lot of money will never happen.

> Can you explain how exactly charging their users money is a better long term business model for Google than selling their data? Because long term, users will realize that letting their data be sold is bad for them and will stop considering it acceptable. Indeed, that is already happening. And so, as I said, Google will have to continually become more and more evil to try to prop up their business model by further o…

> Because long term, users will realize that letting their data be sold is bad for them and will stop considering it acceptable. Indeed, that is already happening.

It's happening at the fringes, in communities that are already more privacy-conscious. I haven't seen any signs of a groundswell of support for this position.

> Then I assume you are long Google?

No, I was speaking figuratively; I don't have any desire to profit off surveillance capitalism. I simply see regulation as a far more likely solution than users demanding an ethical business model with their wallets.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#252

Post by feanaro »

slver wrote: post #150

> Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. All of this has been happening with tracking cookies, fingerprint tracking, pixel tracking and so on. And wi…

I think the cause and effect is a bit mixed up in your reasoning. What's actually happening is threefold:

1. People are starting to get fed up with tracking of all kinds (including third-party cookies). This is happening gradually, but is increasing. A consequence of this can also be seen from the legal side in the form of GDPR.

2. Google sees the tides on tracking are turning and tries to preempt by proposing a superficially less problematic alternative (FLoC) that will be least detrimental to their tracking business.

3. People dislike FLoC because it is not sufficiently lessened in this new normal and is therefore also unacceptable.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#253

Post by feanaro »

slver wrote: post #225
swiley wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want more things like 3rd party cookies.

The idea is that this is the bare minimum the industry needs in order to stop needing 3rd party cookies (and other tracking strategies). It's not pretty but on the other end... ads do serve a function. And not all ads are bad. The focus should be on getting rid of the scammy ones, and not tracking won't help much with that.

I think a sufficiently large number of people is saying they effectively do not care about the surveillance-based ad industry and want it dismantled.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#254

Post by millsmob »

slver wrote: post #225
swiley wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want more things like 3rd party cookies.

The idea is that this is the bare minimum the industry needs in order to stop needing 3rd party cookies (and other tracking strategies). It's not pretty but on the other end... ads do serve a function. And not all ads are bad. The focus should be on getting rid of the scammy ones, and not tracking won't help much with that.

Ads serve capital, they do not serve me.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#255

Post by bagacrap »

mark_and_sweep wrote: post #250
dannyw wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not opt in, it's malware and should be treated as such. Don't let Google gaslight you.

It's sort of opt-in. For websites, FLoC cohort computation only triggers if you call the document.interestCohort API or load ads - these actions are considered an opt-in. ( https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/103 ) For users, it's sort of opt-in, too: You must be logged into a Google account, must have enabled Chrome history data sync, must not block third-party cookies, must have enabled Google web activity tracking…

I believe what you are reading is ways that sync of floc classifier is disabled. That is, Chrome won't save the floc classifier in the cloud if sync is disabled, but, like history, will save it locally even if sync is disabled. (Assuming the setting isn't turned off.)

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#256

Post by bagacrap »

livre wrote: post #171
nabakin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've been wondering. If FLoC is better for privacy than current tracking methods and Google intends to switch to using FLoC instead of current tracking methods, wouldn't it be better for FLoC to succeed?

The problem is that it isn't much better (if at all) in its current implementation. The current implementation allows tracking and identifying individual users (this may be or may not be fixed by Google, it has already been reported to their Github issue tracker). Since it is entirely based on your browsing patterns you can also be tracked cross device (people's browsing patterns rarely change). For the moment 3p coo…

I'll bet my browsing habits change substantially enough across devices to lead to different floc cohorts. I use my laptop differently than my phone and there are lots of cohorts.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#257

Post by bagacrap »

vimda wrote: post #154
nabakin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've been wondering. If FLoC is better for privacy than current tracking methods and Google intends to switch to using FLoC instead of current tracking methods, wouldn't it be better for FLoC to succeed?

Even if we assume that FLoC is entirely good, it's a false choice - why do we need _any_ tracking at all?

The web survives by serving ads. Targeted ads earn content creators more. They earn more because of higher conversion rates, so presumably users like them more (ultimately if an ad makes me buy something, I probably appreciate having seen it).

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#258

Post by millsmob »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #177
slver wrote: post #150

> Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. All of this has been happening with tracking cookies, fingerprint tracking, pixel tracking and so on. And wi…

One difference between third party cookies and FLoC is that with FLoC it is being explained to the public how browsing history is being used. The third parties who send Set-Cookie headers do not write up documentation attempting to explain to the public what they are doing and why it is not a threat to privacy. As other comments point out, it would be more difficult for people to "be all up in arms" about third party…

“attempting to explain to the public what they are doing”

The idea that you can explain FLoC, third party cookies or any other digital advertising technology to the public is crazy talk.

Ad tech is extremely complex and constantly evolving - “the public” includes children, the intellectually disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly and the illiterate.

No amount of documentation is going to help these people reach a point where they could actually be considered as giving “informed consent” to their “use” of an ad-tech stack that often involves dozens of different legal entities and software components.

#####

“why it is not a threat to privacy”

The entire purpose of FLoC is to maximise profit for Google by minimising my privacy.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#259

Post by hirsin »

livre wrote: post #208
hirsin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to reach out? This username at Microsoft. We're working to understand what legitimate use cases are broken without 3p cookies so we can work with Google to backfill them. FLOC helps ad trackers track but doesn't help with any of the legitimate uses of 3p cookies like auth.

Since you seem to work for Microsoft, the broken use case I know: without 3p cookies Microsoft Teams is broken (it shows a not very useful error page asking to refresh the page, when you do it shows the same error again). Many of us need it for remote work so I guess this one of the things Google had in mind when they delayed disabling 3p cookies by default.

Yes, Teams relies on silent auth from within an iframe (all those chat windows etc). This is impossible without 3p cookies, so we're working with Google to find a solution. Storage access API in Safari works, but sounds like it won't make it to Chrome.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#260

Post by hirsin »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #215
pabs3 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auth should be doable with just redirects though right? Isn't that how OAuth and OpenID connect work?

Same thought. I’m curious to know what other kinds of authentication protocols require third-party cookies to operate. Within OIDC, even more obscure/advanced features such as session management and global logout require only 1st party (the IdPs) cookies in order to function. I guess the tradeoff being made here is just leaning into our reliance on the certificate authority system. Whereas before, with third party co…

The implicit grant, while deprecated, is still used across the ecosystem. Further, embedded apps (eg you have a portal that iframes Salesforce and Salesforce needs to be authenticated) can't redirect to the login page or open that iframe for cookies.

Front channel logout is also broken, part of the OIDC spec. It opens iframes to sites, but the sites don't get their cookies and can't write them.

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