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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

#151

Post by doomslice »

warkdarrior wrote: post #139
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.

I don't think that's an accurate representation at all. Look through the proposals and see, for instance, that it goes beyond anything that Firefox is planning to do.

Dropping third party cookies is just one small piece of it.

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

#153

Post by Uristqwerty »

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.

So what, those third parties will then request that first-parties run a cookie proxy to generate and relay your unique ID, in order to get better payout rates?

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

#154

Post by cpeterso »

danShumway wrote: post #115
______- 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…

This is a complete sidenote, but I don't understand why Firefox's Canvas controls don't affect WebGL. Firefox has per-site settings for whether the canvas should be accessible which are very useful, but they don't have per-site settings for WebGL, it's either on or off for the entire profile. Which kind of defeats the point of Canvas blocking since (at least last time I checked) WebGL fingerprinting is possible regar…

Here is a Firefox bug report suggesting a per-site permission for WebGL: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1694456

There's been no Mozilla comments on the bug yet. Perhaps so many sites use WebGL that the user would be pestered with too many permission prompts?

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

#155

Post by doomslice »

reaperducer wrote: post #130
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 incr…

That's one way to look at it, and certainly a view that many share -- but isn't that more likely to attract regulatory scrutiny instead of deflect it?

I sit in on many of these W3C meetings (I'm not from Google) and the discussion is always "given that we want to achieve X definition of privacy (where X varies depending on the proposal), how can we mitigate some of the fallout that will happen". It's never "how can we defeat these privacy measures that are going to be put into place so we can keep the status quo".

You can argue that advertising is a net negative for the web or that it's evil or whatever you want, but if you frame it as "how can we take steps to make things more private for end users without completely destroying the way business on the web make money" then I think the current path is a reasonable one.

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

#156

Post by tyingq »

Uristqwerty wrote: post #153
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.

So what, those third parties will then request that first-parties run a cookie proxy to generate and relay your unique ID, in order to get better payout rates?

I would guess it won't be long until the guides/kits on how to proxy your requests roll out. With some incentive that makes it financially dumb not to do it.

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

#157

Post by Uristqwerty »

dmarti wrote: post #114

FLoC as a source of fingerprinting bits has been an issue in W3C discussions of the project. https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/69 As a fingerprinting surface FLoC has similar properties to the Battery Status API -- not stable for the same user over long intervals, but can be used to help match pageviews from different domains that were close in time. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/firefox_remov...

Imagine sites like facebook, reddit, and google themselves who have more monthly users than the FLoC ID has bits to count. Imagine they store each result for a given user, and assume that, with high probability, when that value changes it is fairly adjacent to the old value. Now, you build a graph database of IDs and their relations. Finally, you link it all to users' profile metadata. You can build statistical distributions around each ID node based on users' gender, race, family status, interests, etc. and use those probabilities to guess at the precise interests of each new and unknown visitor. Also, those sites have a lot of outbound links. Now you can figure out that a particular ID has a high correlation with a particular domain, too.

But only the big sites like google have enough users to birthday-paradox their way into a meaningful ID graph, so you're safe from that tiny ad startup that also happens to be threatening google's business model...

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

#158

Post by choppaface »

BeniBoy wrote: post #13

I might be missing something, but wasn't it part of the plan? Of course the goal was to offload the actual interpretation of the FLoC id to third-parties, as FLoC id themselves do not have any semantic signification. Not saying this is ok, but this was the plan from the beginning, being able to offload responsability far from Google. This article[1] actually shows what it's like for an advertiser. [1] : https://cafem…

Part of the plan but not part of Google’s consumer-oriented hype for it. Google has intentionally declined to state the fingerprint-joining and dollar impact to third parties because it would detract from the (already specious) message that FLoC improves privacy. Perhaps during some anti-trust hearings in the future we’ll see internal emails that detail how much $$ Google estimated that FLoC would take away from other advertisers as a function of what level of fingerprint joining they succeed at.

FLoC is NOT proven to be incentive-compatible with consumers and how they value their privacy. The only guarantee is that users are (on average) harder to distinguish within a cohort. Google absolutely studied the possible economic consequences of FLoC prior to announcement and they are hiding that study. Either because the results are crappy, the Google Ads employees are less competent than they were a decade ago, or both.

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

#159

Post by SiebenHeaven »

______- wrote: post #101
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…

> 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…

Won't turning js off make you one of the few people in the world that do this and hence easier to fingerprint?

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

#160

Post by jrochkind1 »

I didn't realize FLOC was already in use.

Looks like to disbable it in Chrome... you have to find a deeply nested config and then tell chrome you want to "disable privacy-preserving features". !?!?

I can do this. But of course nobody else is, it's telling you are disabling privacy-preserving features! Its' making me kind of livid.

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