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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#161

Post by t0mas88 »

nightpool wrote: post #72
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.

All of the reporting is ignoring this fact because everyone who's commenting on this issue is ignoring this fact in favor of their own assumptions about how the platform works. "Opt-out for testing, opt-in for production" has been the design from day one, but a lie can run 'round the world before the truth has got its boots on. (And while the author does say "Best guess", this isn't just an empty Google promise—if th…

Not just an empty Google promise, but really not even a promise at all. This is just some poor guy that really wants to believe his employer "won't be evil" while the rest of the world already knows they are. But hey, a few more years of making money from his stock options and more obvious moves from Google and then he'll leave and talk like he's the world's biggest privacy advocate...

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#162

Post by t0mas88 »

yabones wrote: post #139
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.

That's an interesting one, in all GDPR countries medical data has an even higher requirement as it's a case of special personal information. So Google scooping that up without clear user opt-in could result in large penalties.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#163

Post by [deleted] »

paulpan wrote: post #105
gentleman11 wrote: post #9

If Firefox had larger market share, Chrome wouldn’t have been able to make this opt out for websites rather than opt in because it would have given them a bad public image. I don’t think it’s fair that some company gets to force every website maintainer (most aren’t extremely technical and just use Wordpress or something similar) on earth to muddle through documentation for their particular setups to 1) learn it exis…

From a purely implementation standpoint, defaulting to opt-in instead opt-out leads to a long and arduous user migration process. Especially if it's a major change and/or somewhat controversial. Furthermore it tends to fragment the userbase and accumulation of tech debt (e.g. feature disparity). I think this is a huge factor in iOS versioning having such good consistency across its install base.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#164

Post by t0mas88 »

potatolicious wrote: post #20
gman83 wrote: post #12

I'm curious, with third-party cookies being fased out, and alternatives like FLoC being met with resistance, could this drastically cut the size of Google's revenue's down? If the ads can no longer be accurately targeted, I imagine that would mean the main value of AdWords is no more, and that's the foundation that entire company is built on.

It depends on what kind of ads - IMO the sunset of third-party tracking cookies gives an advantage to companies like Google. Products that target based on actual user intent benefit from cookie blocks, as that cannot be meaningfully blocked ever. (i.e., when you search for "brunch" ads relating to brunch show up) Products that target based on behavior away from the product will suffer - but morally I'm ok with that.…

The Doubleclick and YouTube side of Google is also a big part of revenue and both use huge amounts of cookie based targeting.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#165

Post by dillondoyle »

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?

It's pretty complicated and my understanding could be wrong and definitely not an expert. All the stupid CIA-style names that keep changing don't help. Turtledove, fledge, sparrow lol.

But from what I think I know that's kind of right technically, but kind of not in terms of actual real privacy.

Yes, the actual browsing data, e.g. for the basic floc cohorts only what amazon product page you visited, is no longer 'sent' to ad networks (that's a pretty big oversimplification of how ad networks track you but for brevity). That data is parsed in your browser to generate a cohort ID for you.

But this cohort ID is exposed to the world document.interestCohort() and is what's used for targeting and tracking.

To me it seems that the cohorts are so small "thousands of people" + IP or UA it's basically the same as a semi-long lasting uuid.

And if you have like even 10 different cohort IDs, even if some of them are 'fake'/'noise' that's probably enough to ID you alone

Here's an image from google's site.

https://web-dev.imgix.net/image/80mq7dk16vVEg8BBhsVe42n6zn82...

It also seems like Chrome/google might be still defaulting browser settings to give themselves even more data just like they currently do?

https://github.com/WICG/floc#qualifying-users-for-whom-a-coh...

BUT when you layer on the other proposals (Fledge/Turtledove/Dovekey or whatever) - which I don't understand that much maybe someone else can explain - it seems like it basically collect this page/product level data and makes it available to DSP etc for tracking/ad serving (again if not technically 1:1 basically in consequence given the sizes of these groups).

Like one of the proposals talks about a 'trusted' key/value server which doesn't seem that different from what already happens? The original proposal wanted to move the entire ad bid/target/serve process into the browser.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#166

Post by bsedlm »

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…

As I see it, the real problem was making google into a for-profit corporation.

The world would be a better place if google search had been made a not-for-profit (maybe like wikipedia?)

By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#167

Post by tomComb »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #128
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…

Google's investment in the web is just like Microsoft's "Embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, just far more sophisticated and nuanced. Just like the new Microsoft's so-called new-found embrace of Linux, open standards and interoperability. It's all a sham. Garbage like AMP, or flexing their dominance in the search market to force websites to comply with this or that or risk delisting, is garbage.

You are kinda' making my point in highlighting AMP: one of the most hated Google 'contributions' to the web.

Why did they do it? Because news website were heavy, slow, bad experiences compared to Facebook Instant news and Apple News etc. and so they those proprietary options were winning. AMP was designed to allow web sites compete with that.

It was reported that Apple News is taking 50% cut. When media companies keep customers on their own sites they have many options - more are now running their own ad business entirely (NYT most recently). For many reasons I hated to see those proprietary platforms crush the web sites, but the web sites really were too slow and heavy.

I'm certainly not telling you to like AMP - my point is that even their most hated, ham fisted product fits into this mold. It is totally open in every important way (look it up if you don't believe me) and it made a big difference in allowing sites to compete with proprietary platforms.

MS is happy to use/embrace Linux, Chrome (even AMP) etc. but contributing is new to them. The embrace & extinguish thing is not the same when the company is creating and contributing the tech themselves.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#169

Post by snug »

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 if Google offered more free GCloud credits and subsidized conversions they generate, that would be a different story.

I'm pretty happy with all the free youtube content, search engine results, email, storage, word processor, spreadsheet, slide shows, messaging, and more I get

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#170

Post by throwaway3699 »

bsedlm wrote: post #166
inopinatus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I see it, the real problem was making google into a for-profit corporation. The world would be a better place if google search had been made a not-for-profit (maybe like wikipedia?) By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010

> By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010

UI changes and new features aside, the web is just so much more adversarial nowadays. It's no wonder so much rubbish floats to the top of Google because the reality it's drowning out all the other content.

If you had the source code for 2005 Google it would be objectively worse today than it was then.

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