Ah come on. The FLoC proposal has built in ways to turn it off. If you don't wanna be put in a cohort you can just configure your browser (even chrome) to say you don't have one.
Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
151–160 of 274 posts
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you use Chrome for the first time, it makes you accept its ToS which tells you they are going to track you.
They will lose that case under GDPR, you can't hide the details in ToS and hope the user doesn't see it. You must get informed and freely given consent. Google is violating both, because I can't click "No" and the information is so hidden you can't expect a normal consumer to find it. It will take a few years but they're going to get hit very very hard by EU privacy regulators.
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Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#153I think this is starting to get to the level of a moral panic. I respect that these developers think FLoC is bad, but what does it have to do with the WordPress project?
It's just HN. It's just like the reaction to AMP on this board. Most clients like the feature if it speeds up the site and brings more visitors to the site. Here, you'd think it represents the end of the internet or something.
If we have to be fair, Google didn't build a browser, an email service, a free DNS service, and free hosting/optimization service (AMP) just because, y'know, whatever.
I tend to roll my eyes at the blind hatred of corporations, but we also have to have both feet firmly on the ground, that these products and services are strictly tied to long-term plans for ROI. What kind of a ROI would the biggest advertising network have? Tracking, profiling and serving profiled ads.
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIUC while floc does indeed build a profile browser side it isn’t something that advertisers can track with the same precision as they can with 3p cookies. So while it’s not the holy grail it does appear to be a small step in the right direction from the status quo. Do I understand the situation correctly? Genuinely curious.
That's what I've been wondering. If FLoC is better for privacy than current tracking methods and Google intends to switch to using FLoC instead of current tracking methods, wouldn't it be better for FLoC to succeed?
Even if we assume that FLoC is entirely good, it's a false choice - why do we need _any_ tracking at all?
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#155> Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. All of this has been happening with tracking cookies, fingerprint tracking, pixel tracking and so on. And wi…
Third party cookies, love them or hate them, have been with us for a long time, and simply dropping them would not be viable without the long phase out. And a long phase out is not something around which you can form a singular rallying cry.
FLoC is a new thing which is just being rolled out, so it's a lot easier for people to resist adding a new thing that makes the internet more crappy and less private.
I think it's unnecessarily fatalist to say that all of this will continue to happen so what's the point of resisting it. Public awareness and negative opinion of the pervasiveness and creepiness of internet tracking continues to grow, and advocacy against tracking mechanisms helps create the type of groundswell which could actually shift public policy to forbid such tracking.
Google specifically is catching some heat for potential antitrust problems, so raising a ruckus about Google abusing its dominant browser position to cram FLoC into the internet is more likely to have positive effect than ever before.
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#156The intro lost me: > WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web – and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code:" function disable_floc($headers) { $headers['Permissions-Policy'] = 'interest-cohort=()'; return $headers; } add_filter('wp_headers', 'disable_floc'); If you seriously think this is going to make…
Please don't take HN threads into extraneous flamewar. This is in the site guidelines: " Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Cherry-picking a detail you find most provocative in an article and importing it here to express how provoked you feel is a way of setting the thread on fire—no doubt unintentionally [1], besides which the grea…
Ok, these are good points. I would love to have less politics involved in my tech discussions and will adjust my own comments as you suggest. Thanks!
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#157Ah come on. The FLoC proposal has built in ways to turn it off. If you don't wanna be put in a cohort you can just configure your browser (even chrome) to say you don't have one.
If it's not opt in, it's malware and should be treated as such. Don't let Google gaslight you.
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if suddenly all tracking stopped, advertisers would just stop spending money on advertising? That doesn't seem right... advertisers published ads before tracking was a thing, they would still do it if tracking becomes impossible.
yes it’s called contextual advertising and it’s fine. Visit a camping website and companies pay to advertise camping gear, travel , etc. Visit a video game review site companies pay to advertise new games, systems etc. The very idea that a user needs to be tracked from site to site and a profile built around his/her web activity is dystopian and depressing.
The key, of course, is that the big successes of advertising, cannot use contextual advertising (much). On Facebook/instagram/... it just doesn't work, as there isn't much context to the posts.
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#159> Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. All of this has been happening with tracking cookies, fingerprint tracking, pixel tracking and so on. And wi…
Third party cookies, love them or hate them, have been with us for a long time, and simply dropping them would not be viable without the long phase out. And a long phase out is not something around which you can form a singular rallying cry. FLoC is a new thing which is just being rolled out, so it's a lot easier for people to resist adding a new thing that makes the internet more crappy and less private. I think it'…
If you have figured out a way to eliminate tracking, be my guest. Mozilla would like to know, Apple would like to know. Until then FLoC attracts attention because it's new, yes, this explains our reaction. It's still an irrational reaction.
Also what's this "predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers" about? You don't need targeting for this. Heck you don't need anything for this. The way it's usually carried out is you hack some sites and redirect them to you landing page about "this one magic trick to riches, banks hate her".
Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern
#160WordPress is 41% of the web. If this goes through and FLoC is disabled by default by WordPress, will FLoC be dead on arrival?
Well, FLoC is implemented on Chrome, you don't disable it, you opt out with a Header. So if Googles find that too many people uses the header, they can just decide to ignore it from now on. Who is going to prevent them to do that ?
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