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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#241

Post by rixed »

pjerem wrote: post #231
rixed wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly hate ads more than the average person, probably even more than the average hell, but it feels strange to hear people sometime speak about Google as if targeted ads were the worse thing that could happen on the internet. I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of whic…

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ? For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious da…

Yes, there are reasons to be worried. Not sure Google knows that much about us though. At least compared to Amazon, your bank, your phone/broadband provider...

50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into existence to be interesting and useful at a time when the world was not expecting that such a thing was possible. Now the technology is slowly aligning with expectations and will soon assist on surveillance and control. We will miss targeted ads.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#242

Post by dillondoyle »

IX-103 wrote: post #186
dillondoyle wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah that makes a bit more sense thank you for that info.

The docs/images they use make it look like an array but I just read the origin trial info page and it says ocument.interestCohort() only returns cluster id and algo version id.

still though the point stands i think. even say 1 million people in one cohort id # (they use 'thousands' to describe) + ip + UA and it's pretty unique, until apple and others proxying everything as recent posts suggest. Add whatever 8 bits or however many privacy allowance entropy and it's probably very unique and trackable over time if you have say TTD scale.

totally! it's very very confusing and I don't understand some (ok maybe a lot lol) of the RTB/context/retarget proposals and multiple RTB stakeholders have submitted their own too and they all have really stupid confusing names. But that's what I gather that it's basically the same result. It feels like the only way to do similar retargeting, conversion tracking is to have one 'trusted' source who gets all the data

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#243

Post by SquareWheel »

warkdarrior wrote: post #198
SquareWheel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than the browser sending a summary of your history, it calculates a cohort ID. That ID is sent to websites, and the website then has the job of associating IDs with interests. So instead of building a profile on specific users, the website (or ad network) builds profiles on cohort IDs. Users can change IDs, or mask theirs altogether if they wish.

So we'll have to trust Google's browser will respect all website's headers that request not to be included in the cohort tracking. Just like Google respected Safari privacy settings. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-googl...

Chromium is open-source. It's trivial to see if it's respecting the header or not.

DNT was DOA. You can blame Microsoft for that one.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#244

Post by nybble41 »

choppaface wrote: post #212
alsetmusic wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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).

The problem with Wikipedia is that Google copies so much content and moreover Wikipedia is a non-profit trying to cover their huge bandwidth budget. It seems a better alignment of incentives would be for Google to pay into the Wikimedia Endowment as a function of content served inside Google search results. They gave a paltry $2m to the endowment a couple years ago. ...and how much did they make off serving Wikipedia…

> The problem with Wikipedia is that Google copies so much content and moreover Wikipedia is a non-profit trying to cover their huge bandwidth budget.

Wikipedia doesn't run ads on their pages, so Google showing content from Wikipedia directly in the search results doesn't take away any revenue from Wikipedia. If anything it reduces their operating costs to have Google serve the content (with attribution!) rather than sending users directly to Wikipedia's servers.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#246

Post by int_19h »

rixed wrote: post #241
pjerem wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ? For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious da…

Yes, there are reasons to be worried. Not sure Google knows that much about us though. At least compared to Amazon, your bank, your phone/broadband provider... 50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into…

Google literally tracks location of every Android device out there by default.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#247

Post by Railander »

pjerem wrote: post #231
rixed wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly hate ads more than the average person, probably even more than the average hell, but it feels strange to hear people sometime speak about Google as if targeted ads were the worse thing that could happen on the internet. I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of whic…

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ? For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious da…

> But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

I would sometimes worry about that. At some point internet privacy will be completely erased, not by malicious or greedy corporate practices but by algorithms scraping all of big data on the internet. This will ultimately be inevitable, almost everything you've ever posted on the internet will at some point be retroactively traced back to you.

The upside is that this isn't what's going to happen to your data, nor to my data. This is what's going to happen to _everyone's_ data. As long as the whole world bites the dust together, I can see the actual damage being minimized.

Of course, this does not take into account living within governments that don't care about human rights and that you happen to disagree with or be critical of.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#248

Post by Railander »

passivate wrote: post #176
tomComb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. They could have prioritized websites with fewer tracking/ads/scripts. I don't believe that Google cares at all about whats good for the web. They simply want to exploit it and pocket…

> They could have prioritized websites with fewer tracking/ads/scripts.

The downside comes down to the end user experience if those websites being prioritized have lower quality material, which in turn might force those users to use a different search engine that might not care about that if it means they're getting more users.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#249

Post by Railander »

snug wrote: post #169
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 if Google offered more free GCloud credits and subsidized conversions they generate, that would be a different story. I'm pretty happy with all the free youtube content, search engine results, email, storage, word processor, spreadsheet, slide shows, messaging, and more I get

> free youtube content

This cannot be stated enough. I think just YouTube alone would be enough to justify Google's existence.

Meanwhile Amazon has Twitch, and people there don't seem to think too highly of how things are being managed (they somehow managed to break every single adblock available and at this point have won against adblockers).

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