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Google’s next big Chrome update will rewrite the rules of the web
- chrisco255 6y agoIs this going to be left out of Chromium or is it part of Chromium core?
- lovemenot 6y agoI cannot imagine how it could be in Chromium. It's a service, not software.
- corty 6y agoIf it is a service, Google will be sent all of my browsing history. That sounds like a very bad idea that hopefully will get shot down.
- jfk13 6y ago> Google will be sent all of my browsing history No, the browser locally determines what cohort to assign you to (based on your browsing behavior, etc). Only the resulting cohort gets exposed to Google (or other advertisers). So they don't get your browsing history, they get the derived conclusion that you're one of X thousand people who share a certain collection of interests. (You may still be unhappy about that, but it's certainly not the same as exposing your browsing history.)
- corty 6y agoYes, but then it isn't a service, it is a locally running piece of software that can be included in chromium.
- megous 6y agoGoogle is sent most of what people type into the location bar anyway (in real time character by character), except if they start by some prefix that makes it look like they're typing a link. Regardless of whether they have an account or hit enter. That sounds like a much worse idea than this ad thing, yet here we are.
- pmontra 6y agoI tried to download a file from Google Drive with third party cookies disabled a few days ago. Drive told me to enable them and retry, because of security checks or something.
- llacb47 6y agoYes, third party cookies from googleusercontent.com are actually needed to download from google drive.
- micah94 6y agoMarketing companies are already side-stepping this. They already recommend (require?) customers that I work for create aliases/CNAMEs under the website domain precisely so they can plant first-party cookies on the site.
- kalleboo 6y agoWhich Safari attempts to detect https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-tracking-defense/ https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...
- mrgreenfur 6y agoPihole recently added detection for this too
- tinus_hn 6y agoHow would this enable cross site tracking?
- htor 6y agowill this get rid of the dreaded cookie popup dialog? or is that GDPR nonsense still going to make those persist?
- kjakm 6y agoA solution that works in every browser and gives the user choice is hardly nonsense (also cookie law != GDPR). It's much, much better than a dominant ad company forcing through a solution that works in their browser and which users presumably can't opt out of.
- tomxor 6y ago3rd party !== 1st party. Same site cookies aren't going anywhere for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of user session capability is built on the existence of cookies. 3rd party cookies only affect embedding of sites hosted on other domains, (mainly ads), which don't use cookies for user sessions but user tracking... or to use the ad industries euphemism "personalisation"
- corty 6y agoThose popups are not only necessary for cookies but for any kind of tracking that requires consent, e.g. all tracking for purposes of advertisements. So if you do browser fingerprinting instead of setting cookies, you still need that popup. For using FloC data, if the granularity is sufficiently coarse so that a person cannot be identified by it and no specially protected groups can be identified (i.e. sexual orientation, religion, minors, etc.), then presumably using FloC data won't need that popup. But that remains to be seen, I guess it will take a few years of discussions in court until this is settled.
- Havoc 6y agoLetting google be in charge of this is completely insane. Current Wild West situation isn’t great but nominating a global king to make the rules doesn’t seem much better. Especially one who’s business model is literally the biggest conflict of interest possible of all the parties you could nominate.
- anotheryou 6y agoWon't that drive fingerprinting to become the tool for the job? Much harder to prevent.
- jacquesm 6y agoWhat's good for privacy in the short term will likely simply allow Google to be far more dominant and ultimately will harm rather than help privacy. Third party cookies can be easily blocked. Anything integrated deeply into chrome is going to be a lot harder to de-activate. What's really broken is that we end up giving control over the revenue streams of millions of websites to a couple of US based companies.
- medecau 6y ago> Anything integrated deeply into chrome is going to be a lot harder to de-activate. There IS still the option of not using Chrome.
- professor_v 6y agoI find it insane that the European Union doesn't really seem to care about any of this. It's a massive drain on their economy. They only seem to talk about chip manufacturing, which only recently started in the first place.
- fock 6y agoIf they only used 20M€/a (which is a fraction of investitions in R&D and minuscule compared to the subsidies for agriculture), they could hire 10 managers (or just reuse the R&D infra) and pay 190 devs at competitive salaries (for Europe!) to develop Firefox the way the developers want it to be (and let the stupid Mozilla foundation do their BS of value-adds...).
- staticelf 6y agoI like privacy but I don't like this development. I am afraid for the future of the web due to Googles dominance.
- hewrin10 6y agoSeems like Google can't build other products to generate revenue, so its doubling down on advertising
- cyberpsybin 6y agoGoogle is an ad company. Not a software company.
- throwaway3699 6y agoAnd AT&T was just a phone company that invented transistors.
- wzdd 6y agoAT&T, as Bell Labs, was a phone company that created the first working version of the transistor, a concept invented and patented by Julius Lilienfeld twenty years earlier.
- throwaway3699 6y agoBut they were at the time, a technology company. Technology isn't defined by silicon and code, but by the fact that a company grows by inventing new things. Google may be on track to becoming an advertising company, but they seem damn resistant to the idea given how many of their new businesses they're burning through to find new revenue.
- ladyanita22 6y agoIt's a technology company. Tech companies have been doing much more than just software for long
- finiteseries 6y agoQuite misleading, one only needs to expand the FAANG label to see Facebook and Google the odd ones out.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoThe article doesn't offer a very good summary of Google FLoC, but I'm sure we'll be hearing much more about it in future. > FLoC uses your browsing history to assign you to interest-based cohorts, the end result is akin to a super-tracker that is present on even more websites than Google Analytics If they plan on using a new JavaScript API for this, as they apparently do, [0] do they really expect other browsers to implement it? I can't imagine Mozilla or Apple doing anything like this in a million years. If anything they're more likely to build countermeasures into their browsers. > Google’s plan is to target ads against people’s general interests I have to wonder if the double meaning here was intentional. [0] https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc
- ForHackernews 6y agoIf Firefox and Safari implement this API but set it to return a hardcoded generic set of "interests" for everyone, that seems like a pretty good outcome to me. Chrome users can "enjoy" personalized ads and everyone else gets better privacy. I don't object to seeing adverts, I do object to having all my personal data hoovered up by ad-brokers.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> set it to return a hardcoded generic set of "interests" for everyone That wouldn't improve privacy over simply not supporting the protocol at all.
- ForHackernews 6y agoIt would if it means advertisers use that protocol instead of devising a zillion underhanded workarounds (html5 canvas fingerprinting, proxying third-party cookies as first-party, etc.)
- arepublicadoceu 6y agoWhat if, we will have a new form of “this site works better on chrome”? By this I mean, check if protocol returns something, else, “this site only works on chrome”. This would effectively force, Firefox at least, to implement this protocol. A version of this protocol with randomly generated data might be better for the user.
- crispycrafter2 6y agoCould someone eli5 this to me? It seems to me that a cohortised approach is intrinsically better for privacy as a whole as you don't care about individuals but rather a group of individuals with similar interests. If this standard is not abused / de-anonymised then surely this approach is a good thing?
- alkonaut 6y agoSo Google replaces third party cookies with FloC? What did Safari and Firefox do when they limited third party cookies? If the answer is that they just improved privacy while not “compensating” in any other way, then why would I use chrome? Also, when things like these happen in chrome, I assume it doesn’t happen in Chromium, ms Edge? So if we want to run a chrome-ish browser and not have FloC we’ll just run any non-Google chrome browser?
- ossusermivami 6y agoI think it's a good opportunity to everyone that firefox is accepting donations (https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/) soon enough there would be no easy alternative to a free web if mozilla is dying.
- pvillano 6y agoAlso consider https://vpn.mozilla.org/ https://vpn.mozilla.org/
- dang 6y agoRecent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813601