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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#151

Post by dhimes »

shkkmo wrote: post #107
jasonvorhe wrote: post #29

What I don't get about the reporting on this topic: Isn't all this opt-out stuff just necessary while Google is testing FLoC and it'll be opt-in(!) after it leaves Origin Trial phase? Or is this Google employee straight up lying* here? https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?... * I don't suspect he his.

> And while I can't make promises about the API's final form... Not straight up lying, but downplaying concerns without actually being able to lay those concerns to rest.

Kinda like when Steve Jobs downplayed concerns about the 30% cut from the app store by saying it's not important because everybody is using web apps anyway?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#152

Post by 8note »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #100
rovr138 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m assuming you means from Chrome’s extension store (not sure why they call it) While they can be installed manually with extra steps, there are also other browsers out there.

Don't worry, Google will just "accidentally" break compatibility for those extensions in a way that's totally not just anticompetitive behaviour, because they've never done that sort of thing, like breaking other Google properties undermine Firefox before, no sir.

Windows phone wants a word

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#153

Post by 8note »

renewiltord wrote: post #146
MiddleEndian wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when people naively expected "Do Not Track" to be respected lol

We actually respected DNT at an ad tech company I worked at and people still gave us grief for "tracking" them. We literally just 200'd the request immediately for all DNT requests. No processing, no tracking, nothing. Hilariously, I even opposed removing the code later because I wanted us to be a good citizen but it was practically dead code because people were still calling us evil. They could literally set their U…

Isn't there a response code for no change?

Saying you did something doesn't help the user know that DNT was followed

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#154

Post by renewiltord »

8note wrote: post #153
renewiltord wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually respected DNT at an ad tech company I worked at and people still gave us grief for "tracking" them. We literally just 200'd the request immediately for all DNT requests. No processing, no tracking, nothing. Hilariously, I even opposed removing the code later because I wanted us to be a good citizen but it was practically dead code because people were still calling us evil. They could literally set their U…

Isn't there a response code for no change? Saying you did something doesn't help the user know that DNT was followed

We tried 202 and 204 and both led some UAs to show broken image placeholders. But during the time we did that people assumed that we were tracking them just incompetently ("Look! They've revealed themselves!" style).

Maybe we tried some other codes but anything but 200 was unsafe to many UAs (you could 3xx but UAs would break on 304 too because the tracking pixel wasn't actually cached). Anything that led to UA breakage was verboten anyway on our side since we didn't want anyone to have a broken experience because they set DNT. That would have been bullshit.

We were dumb-enough to handle P3P headers too (which AFAIK no one really used in the end). Lots of dead code. Ugh.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#155

Post by tomjen3 »

dannyw wrote: post #89
seanhunter wrote: post #83

Someone should make a browser plugin that puts you into a seperate random cohort with every click. It could be called "Floc off"

Careful, google bans Web extensions that interferes with ads (AdNaseum). Only problem is ad blockers got too popular before they made Chrome.

I wish they banned adblockers, because then people would move on to Firefox in droves. It would be a killer feature and reason to use Firefox.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#156

Post by 8note »

SquareWheel wrote: post #136
gpm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cour…

Based on https://web.dev/floc/#floc-server it looks exactly like an ml class, rather than a hash.

Almost certainly your browser history is summarized into a vector, and then the closest class number is chosen and sent.

You might not know which vector the number represents, but it does represent a vector for the centroid, and has relationships with other cohorts.

I'd say it's guaranteed that that interface is leaky

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#157

Post by Permit »

choppaface wrote: post #106

This is a great example of why Google FLoC is not incentive-compatible with consumers nor business owners. Amazon (like Facebook) has a monopoly on ad targeting on their target properties—- properties they own. Google FLoC is Google’s attempt to (further) monopolize their target properties—- the web at large, which Google does NOT own. Google does NOT pay to service the traffic they generate. Google does NOT pay to f…

> (Maybe Google could start by paying Wikipedia for some of the traffic they generate).

What does this mean? You think Google should pay for people who are sent to wikipedia.org after a Google Search? Or you think Google should pay for the information they scrape from Wikipedia and display to users on a Google search results page?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#158

Post by karmasimida »

tomComb wrote: post #119
choppaface wrote: post #106

This is a great example of why Google FLoC is not incentive-compatible with consumers nor business owners. Amazon (like Facebook) has a monopoly on ad targeting on their target properties—- properties they own. Google FLoC is Google’s attempt to (further) monopolize their target properties—- the web at large, which Google does NOT own. Google does NOT pay to service the traffic they generate. Google does NOT pay to f…

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…

By no means I am defending Amazon, but

> make such huge investments in the one public platform we've got

How are things like AMP justifying this goal?

Ofc every company is doing things to advance its own interests, in that regard, Amazon has 0 incentives to share customer data which is truly unique/invaluable, with Google, or any 3rd parties.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#160

Post by t0mas88 »

judge2020 wrote: post #117
lisper wrote: post #88

Wow, the bias in this article is unbelievably blatant: "[Amazon is] preventing Google’s tracking system FLoC — or Federated Learning of Cohorts — from gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research in Amazon’s vast e-commerce universe" Compare with, e.g.: "Amazon is taking steps to protect its user's privacy by blocking Google's heavy-handed overreach in leveraging its Chrome browser to spy on user's…

Isn't FLoC on-device? So 'gathering valuable data' would be users' own devices doing so, right?

Does it matter whether the code Google wrote to do it executes on your device or on their servers? In the end they try to group people based on their Amazon browsing behavior and Amazon doesn't want that. Nor should any sane user want that, and Google knows that that's why it's opt-out instead of opt-in.

Thank god they figured out it is illegal in Europe to do this without opt-in and didn't roll out FLoC here...

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