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A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

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Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#52
post #5

I don't care how big this man's business is, Rosewell is a parasite bent on preserving the established order of datamining the shit out of everyone for his own personal profit. He is gumming up the works with pointless philosophical bloviating, using the anti-big-tech argument as a cudgel of convenience for bludgeoning a nascent privacy movement that has taken decades to get off the ground. I've sat in a large audien…

For what it is worth, it is refreshing to see a raw comment like this one on here. So many times have I seen inflammatory stories, or distressing news posted, only to be met with a collective emphasis on neutral reasoning ("assume good faith").

Everything has its time and place, and this certainly fits the sentiment for many.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree with the sentiment but the vulgarity dilutes the weight of the message.. centuries of privacy rights are drained and drowning right now IMO

> but the vulgarity dilutes the weight of the message Actually vulgarity was invented (and has historically been used) to improve the weight of such messages. It works too: "Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science a team of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA and Hong Kong report that people who use profanity are less likely to be associated with lying and deception." [1] Can…

They used a survey of 276 people and then examined some Facebook surveys about "those who used more profanity were also more likely to use language patterns that have been shown in previous research to be related to honesty, such as using pronouns like "I" and "me"."

I don't disagree with you but that study seems like fucking bullshit.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#54
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google win? Their business is search -- advertising on other sites is more of a side gig for them, and from their own description of their privacy sandbox, even they would not be able to track people across sites. The changes to the web platform necessary to protect user privacy will require reinventing the industry (which will naturally pick winners and losers). I expect that Google will come out in the end…

Googles business is advertising.. take away their ad revenue and see what happens to them.

Yes, but their business is search advertising. You can get really good targeting with just 1st party data (what the current user has searched for).

That's completely different from display advertising. For most sites on the web there's not enough information about a user's interests on that site alone to get a lot of different bidders for the ad slot. Fewer bidders generally means the a list auction price, so less money for the publisher.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#55
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps you should evaluate why you let mere words affect you so much. Ironic. You just made it clear that you fully intended for these words to affect people strongly. The problem is that the second order effects are can vary and are out of your control. Vulgarity is often just a verbal tic for the inarticulate. If this doesn't apply in your case, then you and your message will be disadvantaged by association. It'…

> Vulgarity is often just a verbal tic for the inarticulate. If this doesn't apply in your case, then you and your message will be disadvantaged by association. This is incorrect. Vulgarity is the strongest possible choice when evaluating one's choice of words for emotional impact. I don't know what makes otherwise intelligent folk so damn afraid of them but that is not a part of the world I understand. Why would oth…

> Why would otherwise chaste people shout "FUCK!!" when they stub their toe?

Because in a moment of pain, people are emotional and inarticulate. Obviously.

Vulgarity serves many purposes, but the fact that the words can be used almost anywhere, in almost any grammatical form, makes them substitutes for the more specific expressions that they replace. "Vulgarity is often just a verbal tic for the inarticulate." (Emphasis added)

> Vulgarity is the strongest possible choice when evaluating one's choice of words for emotional impact.

It really isn't. And again, often the emotional impact you elicit is not the one you are looking for.

> I don't know what makes otherwise intelligent folk so damn afraid of them but that is not a part of the world I understand.

So, the thing is, I'm on your side on this. Magic words are stupid. But that isn't what this discussion is about. Yes some people have major visceral reactions against the magic words, (and FWIW your approach does zero to change that) but more importantly, poor word choice and self-identifying as an untrustworthy interlocutor destroys your message.

The people you communicate with have to trust you to not waste their time. People in the throes of emotional hostility might need psychological support, or medical attention, but they are not at the height of coherence. So readers might be attentive to your well-being, but they are devaluing your perspective on the situation because you have none.

I'm not afraid of vulgarity at all. I'm as vulgar as they come, in person -- but in written communication, the reader is not keeping up with your emotional flow like they do in person. Peppering in the carefully-placed "jolt" (this is not my reaction, but is your stated intention though this is not a quote) sends the message that writer and reader are not sharing the same conversation. It's distracting at fnord best.

> I don't understand why this particularly disgusting aspect of Victorian prudery and toxic positivity

This is a deeply simplistic take. I don't think you are in a position to label other peoples thoughts. I am not (and I don't generally associate with anyone who is) prudish, positive, polite, or repressed. Nothing against them, it's just not my social scene.

> And I'm doing what I can to smash it.

Smashing is for patriarchies, pumpkins, and web design. We're just talking about the W3C here.

My message here is that your message loses people with its laziness. You claim to think you're being impactful, but you are not. You might be categorizing yourself as a high-emotion-low-content sort of person, but if your message is worthwhile, that would be a bad thing. Intelligent people resist emotional persuasion, or at least try to.

Do with that message as thou wilt, it makes no difference to me. If you value effective communication, it's worth giving some thought. Audience is everything.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#56

> One of Google's proposed standards — Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short — would eliminate the ability for advertisers to track specific users' web behavior with cookies. No, Floc will not "eliminate the ability for advertisers to track specific users with cookies", the phase out of third party cookies on Chrome will do that, Google needs something to replace the current tracking method for his ad busi…

What do you call it when a company makes a change to its product in one market where it has large market share that drives its competitors in another market out if business? Or put another way, do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence?

IANAL, but even I can see that making changes to Chrome that impact advertising is risky even if you ignore Google's own advertising interests. So far they're trying to push things along, but they need buy-in from most of the rest of the advertising industry before they feel they can do anything too radical.

So as far as Google is concerned the elimination of third party cookies (and bounce tracking protection, browser fingerprinting, etc) is definitively tied to something that replaces it. One of those things is FLOC.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#57
post #49

> companies that use cross-site tracking for things like website optimization OK, I was hoping someone already addressed this, but apparently not. What "website optimization" requires cross-site tracking? Is there any real application for cross-site tracking besides advertising? I honestly would like to know.

It's referring to things like analytics, hotjar etc.

Optimisation as in conversion optimisation.

Imo, a lot of this stuff ends up being just as bad.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#58
post #5

I don't care how big this man's business is, Rosewell is a parasite bent on preserving the established order of datamining the shit out of everyone for his own personal profit. He is gumming up the works with pointless philosophical bloviating, using the anti-big-tech argument as a cudgel of convenience for bludgeoning a nascent privacy movement that has taken decades to get off the ground. I've sat in a large audien…

Absolutely. This guy is a grab-bag of red flags.

There's a wide swath of libertarians like this (yes, I know... not all libertarians)... they want to reduce regulation and give people more freedom so they can swindle them.

He doesn't disagree with FLOC because it's wrong, he disagrees with it because it's not his proposal.

Soltani has it right:

> "I'm very much concerned about the influence and power of browser vendors to unilaterally do things, but I'm more concerned about companies using that concern to drive worse outcomes,"

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#59
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree with the sentiment but the vulgarity dilutes the weight of the message.. centuries of privacy rights are drained and drowning right now IMO

> but the vulgarity dilutes the weight of the message Actually vulgarity was invented (and has historically been used) to improve the weight of such messages. It works too: "Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science a team of researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA and Hong Kong report that people who use profanity are less likely to be associated with lying and deception." [1] Can…

I've got to agree. If anything, the pretension of using bloviating and nascent in the same sentence is counterbalanced with a well placed asshole.

Re: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Mozilla also one of the 10000 pound Gorillas?

In comparison, Mozilla is just a 1,087 pound Gorilla.

Really? I've been following along some of the W3c work on privacy and they seem to have about as much political power there as Apple. Part of that seems to be from their first-mover advantage in the privacy space relative to Microsoft or Google, but the rest seems to be because they aren't seen as acting in their own interests (like say Google or Apple).

As an aside: In some ways it's kind of funny to hear a bunch of engineers talk about technology while all casting shade at the other participant's motivations.

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