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

Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 352 posts

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#241

Post by minitech »

cookiengineer wrote: post #235
yholio wrote: post #173

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…

Shouting is easy, doing so isn't. I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream. Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting th…

> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked.

I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#242

Post by cookiengineer »

minitech wrote: post #241
cookiengineer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouting is easy, doing so isn't. I gave up on trying to maintain forks of web browsers, because their extension API deliberately doesn't allow modifying response bodies. It's just impossible to maintain any fork of any browser because of the sheer amount of features that rely on JS APIs for websites and the amount of commits upstream. Ad Blockers are just a dirty hack that completely relies on Chromium respecting th…

> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.

I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream.

Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year.

When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I was talking about.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#243

Post by Signez »

cookiengineer wrote: post #242
minitech wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Google decides to blocklist their own domains for HTTP header modifications, we're fucked. I mean, you could just stop using Chrome if this happened, if you haven’t already. All the other popular browsers would be unaffected, and I’m sure projects like ungoogled-chromium would patch a change like that out.

I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream. Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year. When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I wa…

> an engine that has no developers anymore since last year

There are still more than a hundred developers working on Gecko.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#244

Post by ocdtrekkie »

roody15 wrote: post #225
mcint wrote: post #7

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…

The issue with FLoC is it based on a false premise. Advertising can be successful without needing to build a tracking profile on a person as they traverse multiple websites. 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 campi…

It's based on a lie, but it's also a lie that's entirely fundamental to Google's existence: The reason Google is the giant it is is because of the delusion you need user tracking and that only Google has enough user data to do it well.

If you get rid of user tracking, anyone or their brother can sell ads, and then why deal with Google?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#245

Post by cookiengineer »

Signez wrote: post #243
cookiengineer wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Ungoogled Chromium. But let's don't kid ourselves, this is just a temporary solution. There will always be the point where it's impossible to maintain patches and keep up with the cat and mouse game upstream. Also all the other popular Browsers are either based on Chromium or based on Gecko, an engine that has no developers anymore since last year. When I wrote about sustainability, that's exactly what I wa…

> an engine that has no developers anymore since last year There are still more than a hundred developers working on Gecko.

Are we counting open source contributors or paid developers here?

Because I think there's a difference in assumption vs reality here. External contributors work in their free time and are, as I'm trying to point out in my other comment, unsustainable as a work model [1] [2]

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/graph/06b1ac14775250a...

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/graphs/contributors

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#246

Post by rapind »

TravisLS wrote: post #227
yholio wrote: post #173

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…

One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. 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 b…

I’d only walled gardens had advertising though that would make the (add free) real internet sexy again!

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#247

Post by ocdtrekkie »

londons_explore wrote: post #35
JoshTriplett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.

Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.

I used to hold this view, and I argued that exchanging ad impressions for web content was some sort of social contract. I think this would be defensible if not for the massive privacy violations, and the fact that Google and Facebook continually alter the deal, and pay politicians to ensure we have no seat at the table to negotiate.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#248

Post by ece »

danielheath wrote: post #234
TravisLS wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house. 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 b…

Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right? That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.

I have the same reservation about ever more tracking increasing conversion, but I would guess in reality the equilibrium price might come as more people use adblockers vs those who would turn them off if they could be assured they weren't being tracked and only being served some form of a content-based ad.

For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#249

Post by bloaf »

mcint wrote: post #7

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…

Could we just make something that spams the FLoC algorithm with garbage so we get put in random interest cohorts?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#250

Post by nickysielicki »

yholio wrote: post #173

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…

All it would take is one multimillionaire/billionaire to look at philanthropy through a different lens for this to become a reality.

What we need is a social movement with funding for Adblock work and outreach. The entire advertising industry is a house of cards waiting to fall. Someone with a grudge and the money to back such a movement could singlehandedly wipe out the revenue of places like Google, Facebook, and most of traditional and print media in a year or two. A couple million in investment could wipe hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue out.

Post reply on HN