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Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

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Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#301

Post by MomoXenosaga »

travisgriggs wrote: post #255
guywhocodes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if you tax it the government becomes incentivized to increase attention selling. If the money isn't destroyed you will end up in smaller scale corruption. One example that comes to mind is HK zoning fees and the government's increasing dependency there of.

Maybe I'm being naive; I work with some peers who smoke habitually. They pay a hefty tax for their habit. I don't really see the government's incentive to keep them at it to collect more taxes happening. Is it super sneaky and I just don't see it?

Smokers dying early saves the State a ton of money, they did the math on this. Getting people to stop smoking is about morality.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#302

Post by mnw21cam »

xvector wrote: post #213
vbezhenar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://amiunique.org/ "Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset." Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.

That site seems to be pretty buggy. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ has more visitors and seems to have a wider collection. With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.

It turns out my browser is unique just based on the http_accept header alone. How the heck did we end up in that situation?

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#303

Post by MomoXenosaga »

dialtone wrote: post #77
comex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that those aren't offered up to every website you visit.

Very thin distinction here given that they can still be purchased by advertisers and Apple has every interest in being the only company monetizing on their platform so the number of parties seeing this is irrelevant if the point was the surveillance problem.

The Apple ecosystem is worse than Google IMO.

I have an Android phone: I use a non Google browser, non Google app store and non Google messaging app.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#304

Post by _hm0i »

zo1 wrote: post #300
bawolff wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to kill cookies but still have accounts? How's that going to work?

That would fall under the 1%. They get a cert or whitelisted or something such that browsers would "allow" them to request the browser to store cookies. Perhaps the type of data to be stored is also restricted in the certificate itself so the site can't deviate from the storage they've been granted. I don't know, it's just a random thought and not fully fleshed out. I'm sure there are millions of much smarter individ…

So you want the ability to be a modern website held by a centralised authority? The world is not a world of static websites anymore; it is a world of applications accessible by a web browser. That would be a huge and unjust centralisation of power.

The most should be a consent popup, similar to how websites request to use the camera.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#305

Post by MomoXenosaga »

jefftk wrote: post #193
throwaway3699 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. I don't want to be rude, but won't they just end up losing their livelihoods? If the advertising industry goes, most programmers will see their salaries drop hugely. Even those not working in advertising will see a drop due to the flood of supply.

Eh. I work in advertising as a programmer, and if advertising were banned there would still be lots of other programming work I could do. (I do think advertising is net positive and prohibiting it would be a bad idea: https://www.jefftk.com/p/effect-of-advertising )

I block ads and I still buy things. The world won't collapse if advertising is curtailed.

Consumer habits will just become more unpredictable- and small companies could compete with big companies that spend billions on marketing.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#306

Post by srg0 »

asxd wrote: post #206
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…

I really wish that ads would be targeted based on server side information. As in what website you’re on, or what search term you put in. I really don’t think ads based on my past behavior are useful to me or my purchasing tendencies.

That's not enough. If anything, it can make tracking more pervasive and harder to control.

The server fingerprints the user and shares this info with an ad network, fetches and injects a personalized ad. Same result, zero accountability: no way to delete server side PII, no way to know what information was collected, no way to know how it was actually used. Even worse, the server gets to read the ad delivered to you, which may leak even more information.

There is no purely technical solution which can replace regulation.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#307

Post by greatgib »

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 can tell them what you want, if people are stupid enough to continue to download and use Chrome, they lost their free will on the subject to the almighty google!

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#308

Post by vbezhenar »

mnw21cam wrote: post #302
xvector wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That site seems to be pretty buggy. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ has more visitors and seems to have a wider collection. With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.

It turns out my browser is unique just based on the http_accept header alone. How the heck did we end up in that situation?

It's similar to Spectre. We had more pressing issues back then. As those issues are solved, we moved to more tricky ones which did not get much attention before.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#309

Post by asxd »

srg0 wrote: post #306
asxd wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish that ads would be targeted based on server side information. As in what website you’re on, or what search term you put in. I really don’t think ads based on my past behavior are useful to me or my purchasing tendencies.

That's not enough. If anything, it can make tracking more pervasive and harder to control. The server fingerprints the user and shares this info with an ad network, fetches and injects a personalized ad. Same result, zero accountability: no way to delete server side PII, no way to know what information was collected, no way to know how it was actually used. Even worse, the server gets to read the ad delivered to you,…

I think "server side" distracted from my point. I'm not offering a technical solution, only that I really wish ads would be targeted solely on what you're looking at. Similar to how magazine and newspaper ads are targeted.

Re: Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

#310

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jka wrote: post #296
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention I don't think that's either possible or desirable. Attention seeking would simply take on sneakier forms that are indistinguishable from legitimate distribution of information and protected free speech. Instead of somewhat independent ad funded publications, you would get publications that are owned by product companies (or politic…

Your reasoning is accurate; but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_? Often progress is about eliminating one large negative externality, only to discover that there are others to handle too. The 'submarine' type content you're referring to is somewhat addressed by trust networks, fact checking, link reputation, and various other techniques. One large question is whether we're ready for all…

>but doesn't most of what you're describing already occur _as well_?

I believe it would happen on a far greater scale, because it would be the only way to get the message across and competition from independent ad funded publishers would cease to exist.

Today, it's more difficult for a product company to justify the expense of running their own large scale publishing and influencing operation because it would have to outcompete advertising in terms of effectiveness.

People will always try to get other people's attention for their own gain. Trying to stop this is a quixotic endavour. I think we should regulate to limit the negative impact of this social constant, not try to stop it altogether.

>Could we have similar transparency in content?

Yes, I do think we could. But I also think that people would still prefer high quality if biased company bloggers to paying for expensive subscriptions. Don't forget that most subscription based publications show adverts to their subscribers as well. Without advertising, subscription prices would rise steeply.

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