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Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

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Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today so I wouldn't mind going back to that state of the world. And 15 years ago pervasive tracking wasn't a thing. So yes, please, let's kill it with fire.

> I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today Having been around for the last 30 years (yes, even before the 90s!) I can say that the quality of news and the NUMBER of news sources is far greater. The amount of data online has only increased and has increasingly been sourced. Imagine the world before, when the only source of news was to interview someone in person or read the copy that particular source…

[deleted]

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today so I wouldn't mind going back to that state of the world. And 15 years ago pervasive tracking wasn't a thing. So yes, please, let's kill it with fire.

> I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today Having been around for the last 30 years (yes, even before the 90s!) I can say that the quality of news and the NUMBER of news sources is far greater. The amount of data online has only increased and has increasingly been sourced. Imagine the world before, when the only source of news was to interview someone in person or read the copy that particular source…

I've been around for the same amount of time so that's not the cause of the difference in our opinions. What might be is that I'm not talking about general availability of information, but news specifically. To me, news quality seems to have plummeted roughly at the same time as the rise of targeted ad industry, which is also the time news sources became "free" (as in the reader not paying any money for it).

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#273
The FLoC debate is pretty binary - you're either for it or against it. I think it's better to frame the debate as "how much tracking entropy should browsers provide?" Tracking entropy is log(cohort you're in). So if a service can tell you're in a group of 1024 users, tracking entropy is log2(1024) = 10.

The cohort you're in currently determined by 1) third-party cookies 2) fingerprinting techniques. Removing third-party cookies and introducing FLoC will probably reduce the entropy provided by the user. Recall that the FLoC proposal aims to put each user in a group of several thousand other users. That's about 12 bits of entropy. A third-party cookie would probably provide more, though I don't know the number off the top of my head. You only need log2(3 billion internet users) = 32 bits to identify every internet user hyper-precisely.

So, moving to FLoC probably reduces the tracking entropy provided by the user. But it still leaves fingerprinting as a viable way to identify users. Even if both third-party cookies and FLoC were eliminated, there would still be fingerprinting.

So, I think the Google approach is "provide a minimum tracking entropy via FLoC, and try to bound maximum entropy by limiting fingerprinting." Privacy advocates want a world where browsers try aggressively to limit tracking entropy, perhaps ideally eliminating it altogether.

See the "privacy budget" mentioned here for a similar idea: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/08/potential-uses-for-privacy...

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Re: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern

#274
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've been wondering. If FLoC is better for privacy than current tracking methods and Google intends to switch to using FLoC instead of current tracking methods, wouldn't it be better for FLoC to succeed?

The privacy of current tracking methods (3rd party cookies) is bad, which is why a lot of browser vendors are starting to block 3rd party cookies by default. FLoC may be marginally better than 3rd party cookies, but still browser vendors are mostly choosing to block it by default. There isn't a good reason to let either succeed.

True, that makes sense
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