341–350 of 352 posts
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Or they'll move on to a more sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling their user's privacy?
A business model that will exclude the poor.
Vivaldi: >document.interestCohort() >VM131:1 Uncaught TypeError: document.interestCohort is not a function at :1:10
This doesn't prove anything. FLoC is enabled only in 5% devices in selected countries.
"At Vivaldi, we are committed to protecting our users from online trackers, and we would not want to enable any kind of user behavioural profiling. The FLoC experiment does not work in Vivaldi, because it relies on several hidden preferences being set, and we do not enable these options in Vivaldi. Our future plan is to prevent the Floc component from functioning, no matter which way it is implemented."
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Tracking definitely works, at least in my experience. That's why Google and Facebook have completely taken over the entire digital ad ecosystem. They just have much better data, and your spend is an order of magnitude more effective than buying directly from publishers. Take the camping example. If I sell camping equipment, I can try to reach out to blogs directly, but I will have to place hundreds of campaigns for $…
There is nothing stopping Google or Facebook from offering content-based advertising to advertisers, publishers and users--sidestepping any issues with multiple small ad deals. A regulator could demand it if they wanted, and together publishers and advertisers could too. Individual users just don't have the same power, and resort to adblockers--which is pretty much their only option if they don't want to be tracked w…
It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment suggested :)
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Yup! Or a Promise that never resolves (since it's async)
Wait, what? Async? Isn't your cohort supposed to be precomputed? And undefined would still have to be handled anyway, as browsers without support wouldn't have the attribute at all (at least for several years after it was accepted, for everything to get the new feature).
The explainer indicates it's a Promise: "cohort = await document.interestCohort()" -- https://github.com/WICG/floc
One reason to make it async could be to give browsers the option to gate access behind a permissions prompt in some circumstances.
> And undefined would still have to be handled anyway, as browsers without support wouldn't have the attribute at all
Definitely. There are also browsers that are unlikely to add support (ex: Brave, as we're discussing)
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It... says "Ad" in a alt-colored tag, has a completely different background. Only one ad, vs. google.com, which can show up to 4 identically-styled ads. Apple isn't anti-advertising, they're anti-tracking, pro-privacy. They're not in the business of selling ads anywhere near the scale that Google is -- the App Store ads in particular are simple, and they cancelled their iAd program a few years ago.
I realized that after looking at the result for ~5 seconds, but I still think its a dark pattern and it could easily induce someone into installing that app by habitually clicking the 'get' button. I guess it just shocked me that the one of the first things I saw on an iPhone was an Ad. But yes, looking at ads on the Google Play Store recently tells me I made the right decision to switch to an iPhone.
That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an…
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
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…
If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
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There are much better options to provide people with educational, informative and entertaining content. Well funded public broadcasters like Australia ABC provide news and entertainment content free. (both text and video) Well funded public libraries can provide a wide range of alternate content.
Yeah, let's pretend libraries have equivalent content to the free internet!
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> You will be worse off by using irrelevant data in evaluating the choice of a particular product What do you mean irrelevant data? I am much better at choosing a product that suits my needs than Google and friends are. The only irrelevant data is the one provided by the ad companies. > the company that paid for the advertisement likely won’t even miss your sale. If that's true, then why do you think they advertised…
If you intentionally discount a product based on the fact that they advertised it to you, you’d be making a decision based on some property not intrinsic to the product, which means that you might not purchase the optimal product. This would all be ok if the tradeoff was a strong signal to the seller that advertising has a negative impact on sales, but I’m positing that the impact of that one sale is negligible and w…
Very true, I've considered this many times. What it comes down to is that I value companies that prioritize investing in their product rather than their advertising, so on the whole I'm more likely to get what I want if I stay away from products advertised to me.
> This would all be ok if the tradeoff was a strong signal to the seller that advertising has a negative impact on sales, but I’m positing that the impact of that one sale is negligible and well within the noise threshold of an extremely noisy process. For all you know, if the seller notices at all, they might conclude that they didn’t advertise to you enough.
This argument kind of ignores the whole underpinning of economics. Let's consider a different situation and apply your argument. Let's say a company sells a toothbrush that doesn't clear plaque away very well. Over time, as I use this toothbrush, I'll find that I'm getting cavities on my back teeth. So I stop buying that brand of toothbrush. Under your argument, my doing that would be a weak signal, because it's just one sale lost for X dollars spent on advertising. The seller doesn't notice, and keeps on pumping out toothbrushes, and lots of people get lots of cavities. I know this is not analogous to the situation you're talking about, but it's still a plausible situation, and if your argument is correct, it should be correct across most situations it's applicable to.
And thanks, I do enjoy your confirmation of my power.