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

Why is it regressive? High earners pay more for ad-funded sites than low earners. That's not regressive. It's not progressive either, strictly speaking, but it's better than subscription fees which are regressive because everyone pays the same absolute price regardless of their disposable income.

- I don't trust ad networks to give me more relevant ads, the data they currently have has not made my advertising experience better, so I don't see why giving them more data is going to fix the problem. I don't see strong evidence that advertisers know how to make useful ads regardless of how much data they have.

- I don't trust ad networks to target responsibly for my benefit. Ad networks are trying to manipulate me into buying products, they are trying to affect how I view the world. That's a hostile relationship, they don't have my best interest in mind, so "more effective" is not necessarily going to translate to my benefit. Ad networks are not trying to make ads more useful to me, they are trying to get me to buy stuff.

- I don't trust ad networks to only use tracking to improve relevance. I take it as a given that their tracking will be used for underhanded price changes, changes to UX to make it harder for me to complete certain actions, deal availability, geolocking, changing results when I comparison shop, and other anti-user practices.

- I want to have control over what data goes into my advertising profiles. Tracking me everywhere forces me to treat my advertising profile like I would treat a cat -- I don't want to do reinforcement training on my ads. With tracking, if I want to be advertised a certain product, I have to reinforce to the network that I care about it. If someone sends me a link, I have to think before clicking on it because I don't know what that will signal to advertisers. This is a really awful way to interact with computers in general, and it discourages people from freely browsing the web.

- Ad tracking creates an additional security risk for my data. I might get advertised an embarrassing product at the wrong time in front of the wrong person, that information might get leaked to other 3rd-parties that are somehow even less scrupulous than advertisers. There are multiple instances of ad networks effectively doxing people, outing their secrets. It's not safe to trust ad networks with that data.

- Even if none of the above was true, I don't take it as a given that even at a purely conceptual level targeted advertising is better than untargeted advertising. I disagree with the philosophical premise behind that kind of marketing, I think that marketing should be user controlled and based on signals that users consciously give about what they want to see. I think in most cases that users should start the search for a new product themselves and decide what they want advertised to them. Even if the advertising industry was ethical (which to be clear, it's not), I still don't want targeted ads.

- And even if I did want targeted ads, heck anyone who is tracking me for advertising purposes without my permission. If your product is so heckin great, then it shouldn't be a problem for you to get me to opt into tracking. The lack of affirmative consent is a problem, regardless of the outcome. You have to get people's permission before you do this stuff -- even if I'm happy with the result, that doesn't excuse you from asking my permission. And no, collecting the data anyway but just showing less relevant ads on the front end doesn't count. I don't want the tracking code on my computer at all unless I've invited it to be there.

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Now, completely separately from everything above, I also don't want to see ads at all and I think everyone should block them and burn the entire industry to the ground regardless of the consequences. BUT that is not the primary reason why I'm against fingerprinting and user tracking. Even if I loved ads, I still wouldn't be OK with the kind of tracking that tech companies are doing, and I still wouldn't want them to fingerprint me.

Any new ad provider (one that does not have 20 years of user data like Google, or 15 years like Facebook) will not be able to fingerprint as well with FLoC as they could with cookies. Existing FANG competitors like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast etc have lots of historical data offer and even some FLoC-like products but if Google's FLoC replaces cookies then it's harder to derive value from, say, Verizon's FLoC-- simply because a cookie is a more effective fingerprint than a Google FLoC.

So FLoC is anti-competitive and just further supplants Google's monopoly. Does that really impact consumer privacy? Well, if the ad market is less competitive, the level of privacy that the market can support will be less consistent. There will be people like Apple who make so much money off hardware that for ads they're fine with the unobtrusive choice of selling Google default search engine rights (versus, say, the loads of crapware that can be found in some Android distributions). But there will be lots of smaller ad players who will get more desperate for ad spam and more shady ways to target you with what little data they can get. For smaller properties, perhaps Google FLoC is so useless for targeting and lift that everybody switches to requiring a sign-up with a phone number SMS confirmation.

_Can_ FLoC be incentive compatible? What are the actual likely economic consequences? Google knows this (or they think they know), hence FLoC got launch approval. But Google won't share those details with you. They want you to think FLoC is just great for privacy. This is how Sundar addresses his position that "we need to work hard on user trust."