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Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

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Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#101
post #96
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial counterpoint: If you want any minimum wage job your boss should have the implicit right to install cameras in your bathroom and sell videos of you showering on the internet.

Comparing user configurable topics of interest (in full control of the user and the browser the user decides to use) to involuntary camera recording in your home is some next level disingenuous bullcrap. Do better here please.

I never said that you couldn't tape over any camera you found. Just that your boss can implicitly install cameras and since the topics are subject to change he can install new ones without telling you any time he likes.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#102
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave hate is a meme because any time anyone wants to talk about anything internet, 100 accounts come out of the woodwork to tell us some Chromium wrapper is the second coming of Christ. The rest of us are sick of all the promotion and get chippy in response. If you’ve been around long enough, you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure. Who knows how far past that…

> you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure How do you know that? You sound jealous.

Because not everyone took the money and some talked about it in their twitch streams.

I'm not aware of anything recent though, last fiasco I'm aware of was something around 2020 I think, though I doubt they changed

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#103
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure How do you know that? You sound jealous.

Because not everyone took the money and some talked about it in their twitch streams. I'm not aware of anything recent though, last fiasco I'm aware of was something around 2020 I think, though I doubt they changed

Are you referring to 1) sponsorships or 2) creators verifying to receive donated BAT? Either way, donations and marketing are hardly evil.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it evil at all if it's opt-in?

It represents a clear conflict of interest with the way I intend to use the internet. There are no half-measures with advertising, there will be no crypto in or around my browser. If they wanted to make a case for using their browser over Ungoogled Chromium, they shouldn't have started by shilling their own shitcoin. Also, their creator compensation program is quite terrible, which Tom Scott has documented quite thor…

> Also, their creator compensation program is quite terrible, which Tom Scott has documented quite thoroughly. It's all designed to feed back into Brave's cut, slowly siphoning your ad money to line their own pockets.

Creators get whatever Brave users donate to them. Perhaps creators should remind their users to donate?

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floc was not enabled in Europe, and was probably never going to be enabled because of its high incompatibility with GDPR.

Ditto. EU already solved the problem -- legally, not technically. A few fines later, Google is actually really privacy-minded to EU citizen. I get a yearly reminder to do a privacy checkup and can disable Google tracking if I want to -- which I do. California and Virginia also enacted similar laws. More lawmakers need to understand tech.

And third party cookies get further embedded. FLOC exists so that killing third party cookies doesn't destroy the ad market.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#107
post #4

This comes from the people distributing an ad-fuelled cryptocurrency called "Basic Attention Token". I'll take their word with two grains of salt and a tall glass of water, please.

They aren't forcing it on you. It's opt-in. Google's trying to force things on all their users: manifest V3, this, et cetera.

I politely disagree. When I use Brave, I always see these "Tip" buttons on GitHub, Reddit and Twitter despite going out of my way to disable Brave's Rewards scheme. It really grinds my gears when a product forces these sort of schemes onto me (hence why I mainly use Linux instead of Windows), so I uninstalled Brave.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brave-hate meme is self perpetuating at this point. Brave is privacy-oriented out of the box. You have to opt in for the ads and crypto. Isn't that what everyone has been asking for? opt-in instead of opt-out? I'm convinced that Google is behind a smear campaign against Brave. If Brave got real traction it could be a serious threat to their business.

Google is often dismissively called an ad company. Why is that? Because most of their revenue is from ads. How does Brave make money? With ads. Privacy-centric positioning makes sense to capture a part of the market. But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google. Are they better right now than Google? Probably. Is it smart to trust a company that only makes money with ads with…

But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google.

No they are not.

Brave exists as a privacy-centric alternative. If they start violating user privacy, it would remove all incentive to use their product. There would be no reason for Brave to exist. It would be marketplace suicide.

Google exists as a privacy destroying organization. They can't hide this fact and they have never really tried to. And they can't stop now because their reason to exist would likewise be gone.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic at hand is whether or not people's hate towards Brave is legitimized. I'm explaining to you how people come to despise the browser and it's developers. You can take it or leave it, but you can't act surprised when people come out in droves to tell you that they don't want to use a browser developed in-house by the same people directly commoditizing the attention market.

But out of hundreds of negative omments I've read across several posts, yours is the first I've heard that mentioned the ethics of a founder. That's got nothing to do with the comment I responded to, and if it was the reason for everyone else's hate, it's awfully strange that it's never mentioned.

Well, congratulations! Now you know.

Re: Rebranding FLoC Without Addressing Key Privacy Issues

#110
post #26

This is Google extending an invite to the EU and other regulators to bring their war hammers and forever ban browser makers from pushing targeted ads and enabling profiling of people. Maybe break Google up and make the Google Chrome team a separate company with restrictions on how much it can work hand-in-hand with Google? Anyone in the EU who can file complaints about these abuses of market power? Tell the people yo…

How can the EU break up a US company?

GP here. I didn’t mean that EU should break it up. I had said “EU and other regulators” to mean the ones in the U.S. too. Other replies here have provided more substantive options that the EU could exercise to force Google to break up. I’m not saying it will be easy or quick, but it’s possible to make Google’s business more painful.
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