Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digiday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 227 posts

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

#201

Post by danShumway »

granzymes wrote: post #200
danShumway wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite Google's marketing, FLoC has nothing to do with the removal of cookies. Cookies were going away regardless, every other browser is doing it, Chrome is not powerful enough to go against the grain on this issue. Separately from removing cookies (which was always going to eventually happen), Google proposed FLoC because they claimed it would help advertisers accept the change without encouraging them to build an…

It has everything to do with the removal of cookies: Google has very clearly been waiting to have a viable alternative before they start blocking them. It’s been something like 4 years since Safari started blocking cookies. You say Google isn’t powerful enough to resist, but Chrome has >60% market share.

Google can delay, I do not believe that even with 60% market share they are strong enough to resist permanently.

It is definitely in Google's best interest to act like FLoC is necessary to remove cookies, but I don't take their marketing at face value. They care about being competitive with Apple; they were even forced to pretend to care about advertising IDs after iOS's recent changes.

:shrug: pretty much every other browser has rejected FLoC as well, so I guess we'll find out if Chrome is really able to just go their own direction. But I think this is one of the rare instances where people are overestimating Chrome's power.

I don't believe Chrome's team would be doing any of this at all if they didn't see the writing on the wall about where the industry is going. My take is that they're trying to get in front of an inevitable industry-wide change to mitigate it's impacts on their core business. It's not out of charity or real concern for user privacy that they're proposing any of these compromises, Google would be perfectly happy to stay in a world with 3rd-party cookies if they thought they could get away from it.

A lot of their recent proposals start to make sense when viewed through that lens. See their effort to propose a standard where 3rd-party sites can be treated like 1st-party. See also their increased efforts on moving away from URLs for domain scoping. See also Manifest V3. Google is scared about this. The are scared of the situation getting out of their control.

And even if Chrome is powerful enough to resist removing 3rd-party cookies forever, I'd almost prefer they do that. It'll make it easier to get people to switch off Chrome when it is objectively less private than every single other browser in meaningful, easily demonstrable ways. And we do need to figure out a way to break up Chrome's stranglehold on the web anyway, so every reason helps. With the addition of FLoC, Chrome will already be less private than other browsers since FLoC is a strict privacy downside over just removing cookies. So it's good for that loss of privacy to be even more private, and to remove Google's ability to hide behind a confusing narrative about how actually their fingerprinting vectors are good.

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

#202

Post by kevinh »

Corazoor wrote: post #163
doomslice wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

You cannot separate the morality of an action from it's usefulness to business, thats putting the horse before the cart. Modifying your last sentence illustrates this nicely: You can argue that slavery is a net negative for the world or that it's evil or whatever you want, but if you frame it as "how can we take steps to make things better for slaves without completely destroying the way business on the world make mo…

Is there a version of Godwin's Law but for slavery comparisons?

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

#203

Post by Farow »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #160

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.

If you're using uBO, it's defused by default: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.35.0

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

#204

Post by danShumway »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #199
danShumway wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High earners pay more for ad-funded sites than low earners. I'm not certain this is true. And targeted advertising certainly makes it less true, not more. Advertisers are not excluding low-income users from advertising, instead they're targeting more products at them that those users are more likely to buy. Untargeted ads for higher-cost luxury products might make the Internet cheaper for low-income users, but that…

>I'm not certain this true I'm pretty sure it is, because nothing changes the fact that you can ultimately only spend what you earn (even considering credit). A share of that spending goes to advertising. If someone can spend 10 or 20 times as much as another person after basic food and shelter then that difference trumps all other factors by a very wide margin. I don't think it matters much, but just for the record:…

> If someone can spend 10 or 20 times as much as another person after basic food and shelter then that difference trumps all other factors by a very wide margin.

I'm not sure I follow? Google ads don't cost a percentage of the final product price. How much I spend on advertising might be entirely unrelated to the per-item cost of my product -- and how profitable my company is might not have anything to do with how luxury my company is, it might just be down to market penetration and my profit margins. Plenty of companies make enormous amounts of money targeting poor people.

Does an ad for a five-star restaurant on Google cost more than an ad for Taco Bell? And it's not like rich people are being shown a larger quantity of ads on a website than poor people.

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

#205

Post by tedivm »

soared wrote: post #109
______- 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…

Fingerprinting on your own sites is pointless since only third party cookies are being removed. First party cookies still work like normal.

The whole point of it is to correlate it to other data using the same fingerprinting method. Google is often a first party and a third party, so they need a way to line all that data up.

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

#206

Post by dcow »

alias_neo wrote: post #137
dcow wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense to me. If you make the system opt in, publishers aren't going to give a fuck because like 0.01% of their users browse on Brave. And that means users aren't protected because sites that were already okay selling their users out are still going to do it. So you have to make it opt out so that users are protected by default. Idk just seems like the incentives are nicely aligned here: the user-centric op…

I think some have issue with them collecting monies on behalf of an organisation who has made no indication they are interested in participating. If my site gets 1000 BAT in payments which sit there because I decided I don't want to take part, what happens if I say to Brave I never intend to take part? Do they give those BAT back? Site visitors may have had the impression they were paying for my content while Brave i…

I can see that. Perhaps there's social a fix somewhere around messaging or something. Ultimately it's not Brave that's doing this to site owners, it's the users who install Brave for Brave's feature set. I think the elephant here is that it's not really up to site owners to say whether users can use ad blockers or not or which browser they should use. If I install an ad blocker as a user, that's my choice. So installing Brave, essentially an add-blocker-as-a-browser doesn't seem like the thing that site owners should be able to opt out of at all. Allowing publishers to opt-out feels like a tactical compromise.

Of course sites can block requests based on Brave's user-agent string if their business depends deeply on ad revenue and they consider users with ad blockers to be abusing their service. That's their prerogative if this really irks them and it's worth losing the users. On the flip side if this becomes popular enough then site owners see real money on the table and they'll opt in to picking it up. That seems like an easy fix for them. If I was a site contemplating either blocking content to users with ad blockers or allowing cooperative users to opt into a more private client-side ad experience which still gives me the opportunity to collect revenue for their traffic, I'm pretty sure I'd choose the cooperative approach.

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

#207

Post by granzymes »

danShumway wrote: post #201
granzymes wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has everything to do with the removal of cookies: Google has very clearly been waiting to have a viable alternative before they start blocking them. It’s been something like 4 years since Safari started blocking cookies. You say Google isn’t powerful enough to resist, but Chrome has >60% market share.

Google can delay, I do not believe that even with 60% market share they are strong enough to resist permanently. It is definitely in Google's best interest to act like FLoC is necessary to remove cookies, but I don't take their marketing at face value. They care about being competitive with Apple; they were even forced to pretend to care about advertising IDs after iOS's recent changes. :shrug: pretty much every othe…

Maybe this will make people switch off of Chrome, but I doubt it. In just the last 3 years Chrome has gained >6.5% market share.

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

#208

Post by fauigerzigerk »

danShumway wrote: post #204
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not certain this true I'm pretty sure it is, because nothing changes the fact that you can ultimately only spend what you earn (even considering credit). A share of that spending goes to advertising. If someone can spend 10 or 20 times as much as another person after basic food and shelter then that difference trumps all other factors by a very wide margin. I don't think it matters much, but just for the record:…

> If someone can spend 10 or 20 times as much as another person after basic food and shelter then that difference trumps all other factors by a very wide margin. I'm not sure I follow? Google ads don't cost a percentage of the final product price. How much I spend on advertising might be entirely unrelated to the per-item cost of my product -- and how profitable my company is might not have anything to do with how lu…

My assumption is simply that marketing/advertising spending as a share of revenues isn't hugely greater for products that poor people buy compared to what rich people buy.

If that is true, then per person contributions to ad funded services would be roughly propotional to personal spending. Someone spending 10 times as much as another person would also pay 10 times as much for using Google search or Youtube.

If these services were subscription based then both would pay the same price in absolute terms, which is very regressive in comparison.

But just to make this clear. I don't claim for a second that my extremely crude calculation is anywhere near correct. What I'm saying is merely that subscription funding is very regressive compared to ad funding.

I don't know what the exact extent of that difference is and I cannot break it down to the level of pricing specific Google ads.

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

#209

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

SiebenHeaven wrote: post #159
______- 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…

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

I have seen this type of reasoning before in HN comments but from a user's perspective it does not make sense. Imagine every user is sending a maximum amount of information, which we can see keeps increasing over time, via HTTP headers (including cookies), browser capabilities, hardware capabilities, etc. This "run with the herd" reasoning seems to suggest the best way to avoid fingerprinting is to send the maximum amount of information, "like everyone else". That only results in ever more information being sent to the online advertising industry. The probability they can distinguish one user fingerprint from another goes up as the amount of information sent increases. The objective of the online advertising services company is to gather as much information as possible from users.

The objective for the user should be to send as little information as possible. If a fingerprint shows the user is not running JS and is providing only a very minimal, generic set of information, how much value is there is trying to serve ads to that user. Users who want better privacy should be trying to reduce the amount of information they send. Maybe the first movers in that effort are "fingerprinted" as being privacy-conscious, tech-savvy, etc. That is probably going to result in less ads served to them, not more. Eventually, when most users, "the herd", is sending the minimal amount of information, the fingerprints all look similar.

Think it through. Advertisers do not care about users who will not indiscriminantly run JS. They go for the low-hanging fruit.

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

#210

Post by hermitdev »

danShumway wrote: post #184
hkai wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to disable it? Isn't it nice to see ads that are interesting and useful to you rather than looking at some useless ads you're not interested in?

No, I don't want that, for multiple reasons: - 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 be…

I like to think of it this way: ads do not exist to serve value to me. Ads exist to extract value from me. They are an increasingly obtrusive and insecure means to convince me to spend money. They are, essentially, psychological warfare on my wallet.

And no, I am not being sarcastic, nor do I think I'm being overly hyperbolic in this.

Post reply on HN