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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#281

Post by xg15 »

quotemstr wrote: post #148
lucasyvas wrote: post #95

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.

> FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you.

  fetch("mycompany.com/" + mycompanyUsername + "/" + (await document.interestCohort()));
There. Now it's neither anonymous nor client-side anymore.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#282

Post by [deleted] »

whoopdedo wrote: post #140
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fed up with all the ads and tracking and it saddens me that even Apple does this shit. I want none of it. This shouldn't exist in your operating system at all.

Why wouldn't they? Apple is in the same business Google is of selling ads and in-app payment processing for apps on their platform. In one respect, Google is better than Apple for warning you ahead of time when an app contains ads. That's not an endorsement, mind you. There's other things Apple does better than Google. But there's no "good guy" here. Only less-bad guys.

[deleted]

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#283

Post by ripdog »

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…

You're confusing gecko and servo. Servo is an experimental web engine which was being developed by Mozilla to test experimental tech. Recently its dev team was laid off. Gecko is the production engine that Firefox is based on, and it's still under full steam ahead development by engineers employed by Mozilla.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#284

Post by ripdog »

midnitewarrior wrote: post #230
tssva wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is a protection racket, crypto scam, privacy violating always with an excuse after company. Why the hell would I trust them?

I've earned over $600 worth of BAT from using Brave in the past 18 months. Can keep it or pay content creators with it, definitely not a scam.

Can you cash it out? Considering how few web creators even accept BAT, I can't see it having any value of you couldn't...

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#286

Post by noisem4ker »

mcny wrote: post #192

Sorry if this has been asked before but why does google need any of this? Assuming a user is logged into Google, Google already knows a lot about the user. Is this about users who are not logged into google? Is this to share information with vendors such as WPP? What is the point of this?

With third party cookies disabled, the Google Ads scripts running on non-Google websites cannot tell you're logged into Google and what's your Google profile. All they know is someone is visiting the site. For them to decide what ads to display, interests have to be gathered through different means. This new FLoC is a way for your browser to let them know what you're interested in.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#287

Post by bawolff »

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…

Because you can't both trust and not trust websites at the same time.

The web is built around the model that websites can create a session with remembered state (well ever since cookies were invented). You can't have that feature without also trusting the website with that shared state.

At least not with the level 9f interactivity expected. Maybe lynx could manage it, but you'll never get all the side channels out of an attack surface the size of a modern html5 browser.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#288

Post by zokier »

yholio wrote: post #260
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…

This cannot happen on an individual level. We need to take the internet standards writing process back into the hands of citizenry. The hacker ethos is long dead and all technical bodies have become negotiating tables where giant corporations divvy up their turf.

Anyone can write internet standards. Nobody can force anyone to follow any particular standards.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#289

Post by bawolff »

charcircuit wrote: post #278
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…

You are just opening up yourself to abuse. Sybil attacks are one of the biggest problems in computing and tracking helps us mitigate it. A truly private internet can't handle bad actors and such will be unable to scale.

The current internet has hardly solved that problem either.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#290

Post by mnw21cam »

yholio wrote: post #260
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…

This cannot happen on an individual level. We need to take the internet standards writing process back into the hands of citizenry. The hacker ethos is long dead and all technical bodies have become negotiating tables where giant corporations divvy up their turf.

If we make the internet standards hand all this power back to the browser users, then Google will clearly just not implement that particular standard. They have plenty of precedent of going their own way, establishing it as the way the web works, and then getting the standards written retrospectively to cover it. (Not singling out Chrome here - most of the major browsers have done this at some point.)
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