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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#181

Post by tristan957 »

ignoramous wrote: post #137
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…

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads... As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho,…

What is the point of having a WebRTC standard if Google doesn't even follow it? Mozilla Firefox is given the shaft for many services because they don't support Chrome-only WebRTC APIs? Chrome and Google are bad for diversity on the web.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#182

Post by sidibe »

_0w8t wrote: post #175
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…

When runnaroo.com was shut down I was surprised that it was done by single person who managed for some searches to return better results than Google. Which among other things shows that patents are bad for innovation in new and quickly changing industry. Google came up with their algorithm and heavily patterned it. As an invention it was not ground-breaking, but it matched very well how web worked. This gave them ess…

I've never heard of anyone saying patents have much to do with Googles success, can you point me to something about that? To me their infrastructure and scale was the big edge they've had over everyone

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#183

Post by [deleted] »

efdee wrote: post #144
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…

Was it though? Search kind of sucked before Google came along. Javascript in the browser was a joke. Google Maps and Mail were revolutionary. I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#184

Post by nwallin »

ignoramous wrote: post #178
_0w8t wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all assumes that without Google this would not happen. But I fail to see why is this so. Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.

> This all assumes that without Google this would not happen. To be fair, I am not the one that's assuming things here. I am speaking of how Google has indeed contributed when they really didn't have to (as pointed out with the example of Amazon). > Linux happened without single corporation controlling it. A consortium of corporations, sure: linaro.org

What does linaro.org have to do with linux? I've been using linux since a decade before linaro.org was founded, and this is the first I've heard of it. Did you mean the Linux Foundation?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#185

Post by alphabet9000 »

c0nfused wrote: post #19
deskamess wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you block it?

Blocking FLoC is as easy as adding this header to the HTTP response: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() Source: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3209628

I'm just curious -- are there any other commonly used HTTP headers that include the characters "()" at the end?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#186

Post by IX-103 »

dillondoyle wrote: post #165
judge2020 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'sen…

The point of FLOC is that you are only ever part of one. There's no combining the different cohorts that a user is in to be done, because there is only ever one for each user. Now, there is some legitimate discussion on his to handle changes to cohorts, since simply changing the users cohort ID in response to a user changing their browsing interests leaves the user open to such a set intersection attack. Some people have suggested options such as freezing the ID for the lifetime of the site's state to prevent it.

FLEDGE/Turtle*/etc. is a different issue. I'm not sure it will be more private than 3rd party cookies since the spec is not very clear and it has so many moving parts. I have heard from some Chrome devs that if it doesn't end up better for privacy than 3rd party cookies, it won't get past the origin trial stage.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#188

Post by Sebb767 »

papito wrote: post #24
xaduha wrote: post #18

It's all pointless, it will win out eventually because it makes sense and Google isn't about to stop tracking you regardless of FLoC. All it does is disincentivizes smaller players from doing their own tracking which you'll have no control over anyway. Personally I don't see depersonalized targeting as a bad thing. Better than advertising dish washers to people who just bought a dish washer or some such nonsense.

That would annoy me less than seeing dish washer ads AFTER I bought the goddamned dish washer.

I've read that these ads target you because by buying a dish washer your category went from "no idea" to "people who buy dish washers online". So while your chance of purchasing a dish washer right now might be low, as you just bought one, the calculated probability of you buying one has actually gone up.

Additionally, it alleviates the creepiness factor a bit ("they're so bad at tracking, they don't even realize I just bought one!", so you don't think about the perfect match with headphones you were just offered) and they might simply have missed the purchase.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#189

Post by alsetmusic »

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).

How is this different from arguing that sites, such as Google or Facebook, should have to pay to link to news articles? I appreciate and support Wikipedia, but I don’t think Google should be expected to help pay for it (though I’d appreciate if they did as a form of public service).

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#190

Post by drdaeman »

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

What would be an incentive to innovate past launch?

I'm trying to think of any changes to Wikipedia that happened after it launched and can't think of any. It surely does its job, but it doesn't change and there is no drive. Wiki concept was novel at the time, they did and continue to do an amazing job, but there's no evolution there. Or maybe I'm just a blind or unaware or biased - but, honestly, I tried to think of something and nothing came to mind.

Google constantly tries out some new things. They're really bad at maintaining them, they can't stop inventing chat services, they suck a lot and we could bash them endlessly, but let's credit what's due - they're always exploring some frontiers.

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