71–80 of 95 posts
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Maybe notify instead of block? “You are using Chrome which tracks you without consent. Download a spyware-free browser here.” In red at the top of the page with links to brave and Firefox.
Good luck telling users apart from Chromium which is fine and Chrome which is a rip off and filled with shit
I hate the data-grabbing business model as much as the next hacker. Equally, I feel reluctant to burn with the holy wrath of anger. It is, and has been, no secret that this is how Google works. They give you great services for 0 money and all your data. What’s unclear or unethical about it? Take it or leave it. What bothers me much more is Google’s et al crushing dominance over the competition, meaning that whatever…
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> While I do understand that some people may not like it, I don't see how FLoC is particularly harmful. Sure, I can give an example: it goes beyond simple basic fingerprinting, it allows you to be associated with a group of "others" (your cohort) in ways that can be dangerous to you. Suppose you live in a country where you may not enjoy certain freedoms or some behaviors may be outlawed; end up in the wrong cohort(s)…
> state actor will be able to know these things rather easily But state actors won't be able identity me individually, so I don't see the harm either. And you can actually reset you FLoC id at any time. I think advertisers (like Facebook) know that this will damage their revenue and doing mass brain wash to make people think this is harmful for everyone (Cambridge Analytica style).
Why wouldn't they be able to? FLoC tells them you're a dissenter, your IP tells them who you are.
Just because you can reset it doesn't mean that you should have to be constantly afraid of your browser working against you. You're just listing ways in which FLoC is slightly less terrible than some maximally terrible hypothetical version. It doesn't make FLoC proper less bad.
I would argue the very notion that your recent browsing history affects what you see in the present is a wrong and dangerous one.
Would I be terribly downvoted if I said that I prefer targeted ads? I'd rather see GPUs than feminine hygiene products. FLoC seems like a method of saving my preferences locally, which is fine. I'm not interested. I won't use Google's browsers and I'll continue to filter my traffic. Internet privacy will always be an uphill battle, there's worse things going on, starting with centralized and monopolized DNS, I feel w…
I even found my current broker that I do most trades with via targeted advertising, and I'm super happy with it.
Targeted ads of course don't always show perfect companies and products, but they're often a good starting point if I'm looking for a product and I see an ad about it that looks interesting.
That being said, I do try to avoid ads as much as possible, but if I'm gonna see them, for example there's no way to block them on iOS instagram, I'd rather they be targeted than generic.
While I do understand that some people may not like it, I don't see how FLoC is particularly harmful. I've read several articles about it, and most of them just say something like "you are being put in a advertising cohort -- see how creepy it is", which doesn't really prove anything. One more specific argument against FLoC is that it will make help tracking users via fingerprinting. I don't really buy it. First of a…
and if FLoC has only 8 bits of entropy From the EFF article that you don't like: > Google’s experiment used 8-bit cohort identifiers, meaning that there were only 256 possible cohorts. In practice that number could be much higher; the documentation suggests a 16-bit cohort ID comprising 4 hexadecimal characters. Also, its since someone can belong to more than 1 cohort, the 8bits is a bare minimum and not a maximum. F…
Yes, but Google already has atleast 32-bits from the ip address already (which I know for a fact that they don't use).
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It’s not local, because your cohort id will be sent to advertisers, and they’ll back-reference that against what they believe you’re interested in. But either way, your initial statement assumes that ads will only be interesting to you if your browsing habits are tracked across the internet. There’s another option: if you visit sites that are focused on GPUs they can advertise GPUs to you. This is the way advertising…
From 1700-2000 you just had whatever adverts everyone else had. From 2000-2010 you had site/search based adverts From 2010-2020 you had tracking based adverts I can't think of even 1 time I've seen a useful advert though
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It can be a death sentence in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Say you are FLoC branded as being LGBT (sort of like the pink triangle in nazi concentration camps) and you visit a government website, they will know about your sexuality and can arrest you.
Political tags are explicitly banned from the FLoC tagging data which identifies locally your 'secular', a-political preferences. in contrast to that Facebook can identify you as LGBT+ today based off your likes and dislikes and shares. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036
Just because this is said to be so on paper doesn't mean it would actually be so. How would this work in practice with the LGBT example? Would every LGBT-related website be tagged as a "political" website in Google so that it is not included in the calculation? What about clearly non-problematic a-politicial categories which nevertheless serve as a good proxy for detecting LGBT members because of e.g. their increased interest in the topic?
> in contrast to that Facebook can identify you as LGBT+ today based off your likes and dislikes and shares.
This is irrelevant because we're not choosing. Facebook tracking is also terrible.
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From the article... > EFF brings up a second concern which is also novel and scary in terms of privacy. If you sign up to an online service with your email address, they can immediately tie your last week’s browsing data with the email address that you supply them (or physical address, phone nr, etc). It means any service you use now knows what you’ve been up to and not just in an anonymous way
How can they do that? They only have an ID, don't they?
While I do understand that some people may not like it, I don't see how FLoC is particularly harmful. I've read several articles about it, and most of them just say something like "you are being put in a advertising cohort -- see how creepy it is", which doesn't really prove anything. One more specific argument against FLoC is that it will make help tracking users via fingerprinting. I don't really buy it. First of a…
It can be a death sentence in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Say you are FLoC branded as being LGBT (sort of like the pink triangle in nazi concentration camps) and you visit a government website, they will know about your sexuality and can arrest you.
I want to suggest another thing you can do as a web developer. If you can afford it, block all Chrome users, and instruct users to download Firefox instead. Explain why your website is not available for Chrome.