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How to fight back against Google FLoC

plausible.io

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Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#81

Post by Grumbledour »

jedwhite wrote: post #63
Grumbledour wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I bother though? Privacy is really important to me, so I am not affected because I don't use chrome in the first place. All the people who use chrome, especially on this site, know damn well what they agreed to. You all already opted into this and everything google comes up with tomorrow. Why should I put in work to give you the warm fuzzy feeling of having staved of the google spying for another day? If y…

If you run any websites, you should do this because, although YOU might not use Chrome yourself, your website visitors often do. When websites block FLoC, the activity of their users on those websites are not available to Google's Cohort Assignment Algorithm. It's not about your personal privacy as the individual website operator. It's about your customers' privacy as visitors to your website.

But THEY decided to use Chrome! So the WANTED this to happen.

Now, you can rightly point out that they don't know, but we are on Hacker News here. I am not talking about someones grandparents, I am talking about users of this site, working in the IT industry. I am talking about my collegues at work. About IT professionals. We all should know, most of us do. Yet, many here always proclaim how they can't use privacy friendly alternatives because "minor reason". The whole industry regularly creates content that only properly works in chrome, reminding one of the old Internet Explorer days.

It's not that "normal" people don't listen to "us" experts and use chrome regardless, it's that many so called professionals seem to care about privacy even less. And I am not getting complicit with this attitude in helping google make everyone feel save using their crap piece of spyware.

Switch your browser now and tell the people who don't know why they should too, or stop complaining about "evil google" while enabling them with building shit that includes their tracking and only works in their browser.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#82

Post by rich_sasha »

patates wrote: post #72
rich_sasha wrote: post #70

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…

The whole point is they do everything they can not to allow us to leave it.

But leave for what? I'm all for leaving Google, I use Firefox and OpenStreetMap as much as I can. I have a non-gmail e-mail account.

DuckDuckGo sucked at searching last time I tried it - and I'd happily pay money for an alternative. Ditto for Google Docs. Google Scholar - another thing I use a lot.

I think the root cause is not really FLoC etc. but Google's total dominance over the Internet, and with it, a lack of real alternative.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#84

Post by o_m »

htoiewur2434 wrote: post #79
o_m wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't think floc tags be shared b/w domains

The entire point of FLoC is to track you across all domains and collect all of your browser history to put you into a group. If it was only for one domain every user would be in the same group.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#85

Post by o_m »

froh wrote: post #52
o_m wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are 33000 group IDs. A service with your identity could track how your group ID is changing over time a triangulate your political view or sexuality based on ID patterns of people they have arrested already.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#86

Post by Booligoosh »

ellinoora wrote: post #62

Plausible tracks visitors without their permission. This is illegal in Europe where notice or consent or is needed, regardless of how cookies are used/not used. More info: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy Note that I work at Volument.

I assume you're referring to the fact that they don't respect the Do Not Track header? In my opinion this is fine because they don't 'track' visitors around the web as such, respecting the original intent of this DNT option.

I wrote a bit about this [here](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346#issuecommen...), pasted below:

> I feel like a lot of this comes down to what "track" means, and what I as an average user am expecting when I enable "do not track".

> Personally, I feel like "track" means following me across multiple websites, or keeping a detailed record of my individual browsing habits on an individual site.

> If you think about what "tracking" means in real life, it means constantly following someone/something or monitoring it. If someone had one of those little infrared foot traffic counter things at the door to their shop, I wouldn't say they're tracking me as an individual. They're tracking how much foot traffic they get, but they're not tracking me.

> Both Plausible and Fathom are just like this. They don't keep the same user identifiers for more than 24h, they just take an anonymous count when you walk in the door to a site (along with a few other anonymous things like referrer). In short, as a user, I don't feel like my individual activity is being tracked to create a profile of my browsing, I just feel like the website is counting me when I walk in the door. They're tracking their visit stats, but they're not tracking ME.

> As cause enabling DNT, what I'm saying and expecting is "do not track ME". It's fine to track your usage stats, but don't track ME and build a profile of ME. So I would not expect services like Plausible and Fathom to do anything about this header, since they're not tracking me as an individual in the first place.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#87

Post by usgroup »

patates wrote: post #40
usgroup wrote: post #36

Frankly I’m not sure I see a world where Internet advertising is not targeted . Sure it drives profit for Google et al but it does so because it drives profit for a million other businesses. It’s non existence implies a substantial economic cost. I’d like to see more written and more popularly known about effective, targeted but privacy respecting ad models. Then a good argument would be “why FloC when X is possible?…

I don't like the defeatist attitude. Targeted advertising is an opportunistic reaction of the companies who lived the first-mover advantage to its fullest, lacking any regulation. The market is big enough and can survive regulation, and would evolve alternatives, and the associated deadweight loss would be an acceptable compromise. Not to mention, the targeted advertising is a game of Prisoner's Dilemma, where all pa…

Sure maybe but I can't think of any precedent for what you're saying. Countries have typically gone from some advertising to even more advertising. An example in which convincing people to buy stuff got harder and people bought the same amount or more stuff doesn't spring to mind.

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#88

Post by htoiewur2434 »

o_m wrote: post #84
htoiewur2434 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think floc tags be shared b/w domains

The entire point of FLoC is to track you across all domains and collect all of your browser history to put you into a group. If it was only for one domain every user would be in the same group.

cookies do the same thing, but you can't access cookies stored for other domains.

(i'm surprised people screaming apocalypse have such poor understanding of the web).

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#89

Post by robertlagrant »

feanaro wrote: post #78
robertlagrant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can they do that? They only have an ID, don't they?

They only have an ID until you decide to deanonymise yourself on purpose by registering.

Understood, but from that ID how can they query what sites people have visited? I thought it was just "I belong to this cohort" with no knowledge of what that cohort is?

Re: How to fight back against Google FLoC

#90

Post by andrei_says_ »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #18
sanxiyn wrote: post #8

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.

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.

I wonder if there are ways to detect some of the other spyware features in google chrome?

I’m genuinely hoping to do this on some of my web properties - if anyone has a hint on how, please let me know.

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