221–230 of 352 posts
Too many folks commenting here seem to think that FLoC doesn't compromise privacy, when it is yet another bit of differentiation that can be used to fingerprint a browser. It's a particularly granular one, as well, placing users into manageable cohorts of only a few dozen thousands in size, or so is claimed. Combine FLoC with a handful of other fingerprint bits and you can track an individual.
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> I have discovered interesting things in Facebook ads that I would not have discovered and bought otherwise. I've never had this experience, between Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Every "targeted" ad I've been exposed to has either been for something I already have, or for something that's insufficient to my needs. Because of this, and because I dislike the invasiveness and anti-privacy of modern advertising, I start…
That seems counterproductive. You will be worse off by using irrelevant data in evaluating the choice of a particular product, and the company that paid for the advertisement likely won’t even miss your sale.
What do you mean irrelevant data? I am much better at choosing a product that suits my needs than Google and friends are. The only irrelevant data is the one provided by the ad companies.
> the company that paid for the advertisement likely won’t even miss your sale.
If that's true, then why do you think they advertised to me? Why would they possibly choose to advertise to people who they weren't interested in selling to?
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This is a pretty naive argument and distinction as well. It's pretty obvious Apple doesn't have financially valuable properties on the web but they have plenty in their application ecosystem. In Apple's view Apple News is how people consume news, not go to the web where the user experience isn't custom tailored by Apple. Apple News is barely different than Google AMP that everyone rages against, try to get someone to…
pretty naive argument and distinction as well. when did the argument move from "advertising bad, tracking data always bad, targeted advertising terrible" to "if Apple does it then I'm good with it"? It'd be a lot cooler if you could respond to my actual argument without namecalling and putting words in my mouth. For one thing, it's rude; for another, it doesn't contain much of a counter-argument. You said the distinc…
Seeing: document.interestCohort is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.
Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway. Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.
You misunderstand - Google is in the business of compromising your privacy. They have lots of teams of lots of very smart people figuring out how to compromise your privacy.
Further, they are in the real world business of doing it. They are not naïve as your comment was - they find the balance of how far they can push it, by a combination of monopoly power, and also cunning politics, PR and posturing - they are fighting tooth and nail and using every tactic and trick in the business, with an unlimited budget - specifically to compromise your privacy for their financial and political power gain. Any area where they 'seemingly' back away from compromising your privacy, is where they have done extensive cost benefit analysis, and come up with alternative trickier or less understood ways to get what they want but that is more politically acceptable.
This is the underlaying reality - the rest of the details of FLoC etc is an information battleground where you as a user are fighting unlimited budget teams that are highly motivated to exploit your privacy. Advertising is in fact just one slice of the power they wield by exploiting your privacy along with everyone else on the planet's.
If you try to look at just FLoC in isolation you will miss the forest for the trees, as the results of FLoC are correlated with many other sources of information.
FLoC's motivations are some balance of:
- reducing PR fallout due to increasing awareness of their exploitation of everyone's privacy
- keeping full access to information they already extract from you and everyone else, and in fact increasing it as possible
- reducing or hindering other parties access to the total information so they gain more relative power
The rest my dear chap is details and their teams and teams of analysts working on this have all day every year to outsmart you in the details of how this is implemented.
FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts which aims to target advertising better without it directly relying on singularly personal information. https://web.dev/floc/ FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out it…
For example if I visit a website that follows trends in computer hardware... advertisers may pay to put ads in this site to PC parts, etc. If I visit a site about popular camping locations.. advertisers can purchase ads that are relevant to camping,gear, travel etc.
The very idea that we need a tracking identity that monitors and identifies behavior from site to site is ridiculous.
Seeing: document.interestCohort is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.
Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway. Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.
Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and…
Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.
Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and…
I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google. I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Tel…
I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?
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True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. Id gladly pay for my content just to watch the ad-tech industry die, its not just about "ads", they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
> True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. But why? > they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state. But FLoC is explicitly about doing ads in a way that does not lead to a "surveillance police state". So why is it bad?
Because it effectively exposes your browsing history. If privacy is a concern that's not something you want.
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I see irrelevant ads anyway. I’d rather block all this and use Brave and/or an ad blocker. A choice of least worst is not necessary.
Brave is a protection racket, crypto scam, privacy violating always with an excuse after company. Why the hell would I trust them?