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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#201

Post by PhineasRex »

tomComb wrote: post #167
loudtieblahblah wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kee…

That's 100% bullshit. Google made AMP to lock media companies into their ad network. All AMP pages have to use their ad network exclusively.

If they wanted to penalize slow sites they could have… penalized slow sites. There are numerous metrics (paint time, etc) that they can track for that.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#202

Post by dcow »

noahtallen wrote: post #173
fastball wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost guaranteed to be a privacy violation unless you think Amazon can write complicated yet bug-free networking code.

I’m not sure about the privacy part, but they do have very good success with AWS, which I’m sure includes loads and loads of network code.

Amazon has some top notch mesh engineers, I know this personally. I highly doubt their talent is being used on this mesh effort, sadly.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#203

Post by jptech »

ActorNightly wrote: post #195
fastball wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeahhhh, but Amazon makes a ton off their own ad business and is trying to turn everyone's personal devices into a mesh network they own. They don't give af about user privacy.

They very much do. When is the last time you heard about any private data leak from Amazon?

So your suggesting that add long as our personal information is in their hands and is utilised for maximizing profits but hasn't leaked we shouldn't worry about privacy?

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#204

Post by ineedasername »

_0w8t wrote: post #171
ignoramous wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

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.

Linux was helped along massively when IBM embraced it and invested a $billion in it in 2000.

RedHat benefited significantly from funding by large corporations in it's early days.

Undoubtedly these companies helped shape the Linux ecosystem. A single company doesn't control it, but as big as Google is a single company doesn't control the web either.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#205

Post by stock_toaster »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #86
Mizza wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else goes in this field? Can we all collude to flood Google's spybox with garbage data?

It's specified here: https://www.w3.org/TR/permissions-policy-1/#policy-controlle... There is a non-exhaustive list of features/APIs here: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-feature-policy/blob/master/... Each feature takes an allowlist, specifying which, if any, origins can use the feature.

there is apparently no way to define a default disable either, so to turn off all the random features, the header becomes huge.

https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-permissions-policy/issues/1...

What is happening in w3c?!

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#206

Post by shakna »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #32
dylan604 wrote: post #25

Why do we believe the Googs will actually honor this flag? If it's just an HTTP header, the browser can be made to just act like it's not there. All of these "flags" are essentially honor policy level things (just like robots.txt), but if the thing is not even told to look for the flag, there's nothing stopping from doing exaclty what is being asked not to do.

They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right? Just one whistleblower and it's over. Why risk it? Also: Afaik it's opt-in after it leaves Origin Trial phase [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...

> They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right?

Sort of. Kind of.

googlebot only respects part of robots.txt, the part that refers specifically to itself. It doesn't respect global robots.txt rules.

Google also explicitly don't really respect the disallow rules:

> However, robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on external information such as incoming links, that it is relevant. If you wish to explicitly block a page from being indexed, you should instead use the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. In this case, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, because the page must be crawled in order for the tag to be seen and obeyed. [0]

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/ro...

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#207

Post by jay_kyburz »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #170
bsedlm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm often ridiculed for this idea when I voice it, but on day soon I'd like to make a search engine that is only whitelisted domains, with opinionated / hand curated weightings.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#208

Post by smilliken »

shakna wrote: post #206
jasonvorhe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right? Just one whistleblower and it's over. Why risk it? Also: Afaik it's opt-in after it leaves Origin Trial phase [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...

> They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right? Sort of. Kind of. googlebot only respects part of robots.txt, the part that refers specifically to itself. It doesn't respect global robots.txt rules. Google also explicitly don't really respect the disallow rules: > However, robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on exte…

Googlebot also doesn't respect crawl delays in robots.txt.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#210

Post by thatguy0900 »

ec109685 wrote: post #63
flixic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It speaks volumes that Google allows many ad blocking extensions in Chrome Web Store, but blocked an extension that was doing exactly that: https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html

Does that actually work? It seems like clicking on every ad would be easy to filter out.

I remember reading about it on here a while ago and some Googler said that it was easily identified as automated clicking on their end, they have pretty sophisticated antifraud systems.
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