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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#131

Post by dylan604 »

papito wrote: post #44
dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are just trying to help you out. They know there are "if you find it cheaper in the next 30 days, we'll refund the difference" policies out there. So those ads are actually much more helpful than you are giving credit. They can't help it you chose poorly and used a site that did not have that policy. /s

If I ever decide to uninstall, re-pack, and return a dishwasher after I find it for $40 cheaper, I will let you know.

The point of the offer is that you don't have to do that. You just report that you found it, they verify, and then they will refund the difference in prices. Very few vendors do this, but it is a legit offer to help alleviate those post purchase regrets.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#132

Post by fastball »

kevingadd wrote: post #94
fastball wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeahhhh, but Amazon makes a ton off their own ad business and is trying to turn everyone's personal devices into a mesh network they own. They don't give af about user privacy.

IMO these two things are compatible. Their mesh network is incredibly gross but it's not a privacy violation, it's bad in other ways.

It's almost guaranteed to be a privacy violation unless you think Amazon can write complicated yet bug-free networking code.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#133

Post by dylan604 »

dineshdb wrote: post #103
lupire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why such loyalty to one piece of legal fiction but not another?

I think the point was first party tracking was okay, irrespective of whether it was Google or Amazon. I expect first party tracking on YouTube and find it useful, but wouldn't want Google to track my activities across the internet.

yes, this. thanks for helping clarify

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#134

Post by dreamcompiler »

ysavir wrote: post #96
dreamcompiler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use Firefox, but for some years now Firefox on the Mac (when I have a few dozen tabs open) causes multi-tens-of-seconds pauses whenever I do anything with the mouse like click or scroll. Some of these throw up a rainbow cursor; some just silently do nothing. And yes, I'm using the latest version of everything, including hardware. While Mozilla obsesses about eye candy, they lose market share because t…

If that's really the only thing keeping you from Firefox, which you would "love" to do, why not stop keeping dozens of tab open at a time?

because...it's a use case that I like that works fine in other browsers?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#135

Post by dylan604 »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #32
dylan604 wrote: post #25

Why do we believe the Googs will actually honor this flag? If it's just an HTTP header, the browser can be made to just act like it's not there. All of these "flags" are essentially honor policy level things (just like robots.txt), but if the thing is not even told to look for the flag, there's nothing stopping from doing exaclty what is being asked not to do.

They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right? Just one whistleblower and it's over. Why risk it? Also: Afaik it's opt-in after it leaves Origin Trial phase [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...

>They've been respecting robots.txt

sorry, wasn't meaning to imply Googs ignores robots.txt. I was going for conceptually it is easy to ignore it, just as it is easy, conceptually, to ignore HTTP headers.

>and tracking opt-outs for years, right?

is this provable? if i opt-out with my g-account in the browser on a desktop, that should imply i want out of all tracking, yet you have to do it on each app on each platform. it's wack-a-mole that is impossible to win.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#136

Post by SquareWheel »

gpm wrote: post #124
SquareWheel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere in this document does it claim that a summary of your browser history is being sent to websites. It explains the actual process of how cohort IDs are generated and used.

A cohort id is literally a summary statistic... I think the problem here is just one of language, a summary statistic is a number calculated from a set of data that gives you some idea of the contents of the data, but condenses it in a way that you can't reproduce the original data. Common examples for numeric data sets are things like mean, mode, median, standard deviation. Common examples for data sets consisting o…

I think language could be an issue here, but the problem as I see it is that cohort ID doesn't contain even a summary of the data. It's really just a number.

The website or ad network is able to read those numbers and build profiles on them, but it's still divorced from the user and their specific data.

I think a better comparison is that of a hash. It sums up the data, but is just a unique identifier for it. Of course with a cohort ID it's non-unique (by design).

Because the browser is only sending a number, it retains the ability to change, randomize, or obscure that number. That's an important privacy consideration of the system.

For what it's worth, I do think more work is needed. One of Mozilla's suggestions which I liked was to automatically send a missing ID on occasion, just to keep things a little hazy and reduce fingerprinting viability.

Fingerprinting is inherently less-necessary as a result of FloC, and you need to balance it to not become necessary again, but it's a way to protect users that fully opt-out without themselves become fingerprintable.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#137

Post by ignoramous »

inopinatus wrote: post #129
tomComb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's investments in the web has been massive. Your whole framing can be flipped on its head be pointing out that Google, unlike Amazon has been willing to make such huge investments in the one public platform we've got. Obviously Google does it for self interested reasons, but thank goodness they do - you can hate Google and targeted ads all you want but without Google pushing web and ad tech forward it would sta…

On the contrary, the end-to-end federated Internet was doing just fine before Google came along, and will do just fine, perhaps better, when it's gone and no longer trying to co-opt every god-damn standards process for their own preferences. No-one has a monopoly on innovation: most inventions are driven by necessity, and large companies stifle genius, they don't foster it. Far from being the greater good, Google is…

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads...

As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#138

Post by hahahasure »

tgv wrote: post #92
hahahasure wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox just sucks. For some computers it works, but me and others have all sorts of breaking issues. I tried Firefox, it just sucks. Edit- shoot the messenger, it won't fix Firefox bugs or help their market share.

I've been using FF since forever (first Navigator, then a macos variant called Camino, and after it EOL'd, Firefox; tried quite a few others too, but always returned to FF). Never a problem, except of course with websites that don't test if it works on Firefox. > shoot the messenger, it won't fix Firefox bugs or help their market share. Your message doesn't really contribute to it either. If you hate Firefox with a p…

I couldn't access this website with Firefox.

Firefox is doing the damage to themselves.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#139

Post by yabones »

robin_reala wrote: post #4

We blocked FLoC at my company because we couldn’t see the benefit in allowing it. If, in the future, an obvious value shows itself, then we’ll re-evaluate. But at the moment there’s only a business and reputational cost to allowing Google to harvest our users’ data.

We blocked it as well. Since we deal with health data, it seemed unethical to allow Google to add people to the "possibly sick" bucket and use that as part of their marketing.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#140

Post by fleddr »

dylan604 wrote: post #28
papito wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would annoy me less than seeing dish washer ads AFTER I bought the goddamned dish washer.

They are just trying to help you out. They know there are "if you find it cheaper in the next 30 days, we'll refund the difference" policies out there. So those ads are actually much more helpful than you are giving credit. They can't help it you chose poorly and used a site that did not have that policy. /s

That's not the reason you keep seeing ads for products you just bought. Google was aware of your interest in the product yet was unable to track that you actually bought one. So they think you're still looking.
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