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Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

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Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#121

Post by granzymes »

danShumway wrote: post #97

But this can't be, people assured me that FLoC was an improvement to privacy, and that it would provide an alternative to persistent identifiers and profiles, and that it would help end the arms race on fingerprinting. You mean to tell me that FLoC will be used for fingerprinting anyway, and it changes nothing about advertiser's strategies and tracking techniques, and they won't self-regulate, and that it doesn't wor…

> people assured me that FLoC was an improvement to privacy

It is an improvement to privacy. Cookies uniquely identify me with no other information required. FLoC does not uniquely identify me with no other information required.

The opt-out is similar too: block cookies in the browser or block FLoC in the browser.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#122

Post by ericholscher »

pmurt7 wrote: post #27

We need to collectively switch to Firefox and Brave.

I'm biased, but a lot of users should also be using products that respect user privacy. We're building a dev-focused ad network called EthicalAds that does this: https://www.ethicalads.io/ -- but there's lots of other privacy-focused products out there we should be building and supporting.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#123

Post by sshumaker »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #80
pmurt7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium/Blink is an open source project (forked from Webkit, forked from KHTML).

Chromium/Blink is pretty much only maintained by Google. Google decides what goes in and what doesn't. It's a pretense of open source, except when it serves them.

Actually there is now a ton of contribution from Microsoft as well.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#124

Post by tyingq »

robertlagrant wrote: post #95
ohgodplsno wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium/Blink is pretty much only maintained by Google. Google decides what goes in and what doesn't. It's a pretense of open source, except when it serves them.

That's often how open source works. It may not be what you want, but it's not just a pretense.

I think it can be. AOSP feels a lot like a pretense.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#125

Post by doomslice »

Just as a reminder, Google is also planning to drastically improve privacy through a sandbox in Chrome: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

FLoC (and FLEDGE, and PARAKEET, and a million other bird proposals) is being used as a way to mitigate some of the loss that publishers and advertisers will see when those privacy measures are put into place.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#126

Post by CivBase »

granzymes wrote: post #121
danShumway wrote: post #97

But this can't be, people assured me that FLoC was an improvement to privacy, and that it would provide an alternative to persistent identifiers and profiles, and that it would help end the arms race on fingerprinting. You mean to tell me that FLoC will be used for fingerprinting anyway, and it changes nothing about advertiser's strategies and tracking techniques, and they won't self-regulate, and that it doesn't wor…

> people assured me that FLoC was an improvement to privacy It is an improvement to privacy. Cookies uniquely identify me with no other information required. FLoC does not uniquely identify me with no other information required. The opt-out is similar too: block cookies in the browser or block FLoC in the browser.

You're talking about FLoC as an alternative to third party cookies, but major browsers had already done away with those before the rollout of FLoC. If getting rid of third party cookies was two steps forward, FLoC is one step back. We're technically further ahead than where we started, but that certainly wasn't thanks to FLoC. Without it we'd be even further ahead, so that's what we should be advocating for.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#127

Post by unknown_error »

pjerem wrote: post #85
cheschire wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter if the underlying engine is shared amongst multiple browsers?

Because it creates a web that is not meant to work following a standard but to work on only one engine. What this means is that this engine becomes the de facto standard of the web and this standard is controlled by the main contributor of the engine. Every browser is now constrained by Google's own decision about what should the web be. Sure, they could technically disagree by forking WebKit/Blink, but since website…

Arguably the engine SHOULD be the standard. The W3C and WHATWG have never been able to reliably document, much less enforce, standards. Add in ECMAScript variances and all the other newfangled web APIs and it's a losing proposition. The standards bodies never could keep up with the pace of innovation. Might as well let the code BE the standard.

That's already the way it works in the real world... the standards are irrelevant and ignored, only caniuse and browserslist actually matter. Like it or not, Blink is the new IE6, and its marketshare is only increasing.

Ideally it would be something not controlled by Google but by an independent third party (hand Blink over to Mozilla, deprecate Gecko?), but good luck with that.

Maybe this system wouldn't be as ideologically pure as building compatible renderers to a set standard, but it would result in far better developer and end-user experiences as the web quickly standardizes to a single renderer. The world simply does not need 10 different ways to display HTML with 90% compatibility.

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#128

Post by whoopdedo »

tyingq wrote: post #117

I'm hoping for a sort of community revolt where most popular pieces of software that serve http, and most popular websites send back the "Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()" header as a default setting. I know Github did this, hoping others will follow.

Does that really do anything? The entire Permissions-Policy header confuses me. Isn't that telling the browser to lock the FLoC API for that domain. So no resources loaded from github.com won't be able to call the interest_cohort() function. But GitHub doesn't serve ads, so why would their scripts be using the function? And what's the point of declaring that scripts from your domain are not allowed to use the FLoC API (Or geolocation which is the only other policy I'm aware of.) versus just not putting the code in your scripts in the first place?

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#129

Post by dcow »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #92
alias_neo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it Brave that uses BAT? You're being downvoted but weren't they collecting BAT for sites whose owners had never signed up, and presumably keeping it if the owner didn't claim it?

Right, that's what I was thinking of. They created an opt-out system for publishers. The reader can guess how Brave expects to make money with a free browser that is handing out BAT :-)

This makes sense to me. If you make the system opt in, publishers aren't going to give a fuck because like 0.01% of their users browse on Brave. And that means users aren't protected because sites that were already okay selling their users out are still going to do it. So you have to make it opt out so that users are protected by default. Idk just seems like the incentives are nicely aligned here: the user-centric option also happens to be the one that benefits the browser vendor. Isn't that what we want?

Re: Ad tech firms test ways to connect Google’s FLoC to other data

#130

Post by reaperducer »

doomslice wrote: post #125

Just as a reminder, Google is also planning to drastically improve privacy through a sandbox in Chrome: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... FLoC (and FLEDGE, and PARAKEET, and a million other bird proposals) is being used as a way to mitigate some of the loss that publishers and advertisers will see when those privacy measures are put into place.

FLoC (and FLEDGE, and PARAKEET, and a million other bird proposals) is being used as a way to mitigate some of the loss that publishers and advertisers will see when those privacy measures are put into place.

I think this illustrates that the whole bird-brained idea is to placate the advertisers so they won't run to congress, while continuing to allow Google to fingerprint people with its own, better, data, thus increasing its advertising advantage.

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