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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

#131

Post by extr »

pluc wrote: post #49
alias_neo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to FF years ago. I used to root my Android phones but I'm getting too old (read; jaded) to care now, Firefox means that with uBlock I _still_ never see ads on my phone. I pay for apps I want to use, and I don't use apps which don't have an alternative to ad-supported, with one exception being Twitter and "Promoted" tweets, which I can spot and skip in a blink.

If you want to have fun with Twitter ads, block the advertiser whenever you see them. After two weeks or so you start to get really.. different stuff.

I've been using twitter since 2009 and do this religiously, I have literally thousands of corporate accounts blocked. My ads at this point are incredibly niche, bordering on surreal. Sometimes I will retweet them just because they're so absurd.

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

#132

Post by tpxl »

soared wrote: post #109
______- wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> End the arms race on fingerprinting Google is known to fingerprint you on their sites[0] and this practice will continue unless some sort of political action is taken to make fingerprinting illegal. WebGL is not the only heuristic used to reliably determine it's a specific device accessing a site, but a whole slew of techniques can be used to reliably determine it is 'you' who is on a site (you can even detect if a…

Fingerprinting on your own sites is pointless since only third party cookies are being removed. First party cookies still work like normal.

It gives you the ground truth with which you then correlate fingerprints from non-first-party domains.

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

#133

Post by judge2020 »

CivBase wrote: post #126
granzymes wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was created so that well-behaved adtech companies could target based on FLOC alone, without having to resort to fingerprinting. Just as before, less-reputable adtech will continue to fingerprint to try to advertise to people with third party cookies turned off. As chrome continues to implement fingerprint resistance technologies, these techniques will continue to be less useful for people trying to advertise not based on FLOC alone.

Basically, it’s a way for google to implement fingerprint resistance in chrome and default to blocking third party cookies without killing their own funding source.

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

#134

Post by pjerem »

unknown_error wrote: post #127
pjerem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ir…

Yes but its giving too much power to one actor only. What if Google decides to stop supporting an architecture, or decides that it's ok to have 8GB ram as a requirement ? What if they choose to implement a hardware accelerated feature that works only with NVIDIA LATEST-WHATEVER-AI-VR-HYPE ? What if they want to implement "crypto payment" as a standard and, oh, that's GDollars ?

Of course those are just random made up ideas but the point I want to make is that it's giving only one actor the power to define what the future of our only and sole international knowledge network will be.

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

#136

Post by DasIch »

judge2020 wrote: post #133
CivBase wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was created so that well-behaved adtech companies could target based on FLOC alone, without having to resort to fingerprinting. Just as before, less-reputable adtech will continue to fingerprint to try to advertise to people with third party cookies turned off. As chrome continues to implement fingerprint resistance technologies, these techniques will continue to be less useful for people trying to advertise not b…

If you care about privacy, "well-behaved adtech companies" is an oxymoron.

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

#137

Post by alias_neo »

dcow wrote: post #129
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

I think some have issue with them collecting monies on behalf of an organisation who has made no indication they are interested in participating. If my site gets 1000 BAT in payments which sit there because I decided I don't want to take part, what happens if I say to Brave I never intend to take part? Do they give those BAT back? Site visitors may have had the impression they were paying for my content while Brave is pocketing it.

Personally I reserve judgement, but I see why some look at it this way.

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

#138

Post by drcongo »

pengwing wrote: post #53

Oh, no! This means I might still get relevant ads that relate to my unique interests as an individual instead of some least common denominator cookie cutter garbage ad.

This post is staggeringly under-informed. Just wait until you google for some ailment and your life insurance premium magically goes up.

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

#139

Post by warkdarrior »

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.

This is a very loose definition of "privacy." It is more accurate to say that they plan to create a sandbox for privacy, to limit the amount of privacy you are allowed to have. As the article describes, all of these techniques are additional signals for tracking purposes.

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

#140

Post by tyingq »

whoopdedo wrote: post #128
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 AP…

The EFF summarizes it this way:

"If you are a website owner, your site will automatically be included in FLoC calculations if it accesses the FLoC API or if Chrome detects that it serves ads."

Personally, I don't trust Google that much. Chrome knows which websites I've been to, so it could easily (accidentally, or on purpose) just include any site. Google also has a history of starting conservatively, then rolling out stuff a little at a time. "Boiling Frogs".

Rolling out the header everywhere seems like a good way to keep Google honest about it. Chrome can obviously still do whatever it wants, but it would be harder to explain for them if they shared info on an explicitly opted-out site visit.

It's also just a sort of ceremonial way of expressing dissent with the idea in general. In a way that people could collect statistics on and track.

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