9 ms·

Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blo

by btown 6y ago

Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/FLoC/FLOC-Whitepaper-Google.pdf https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/... https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.

phkahler 6y ago
Would that method benefit from Googles existing people database? I'm thinking it would, and maybe disabling current tracking will kick the ladder out from potential competitors! Still probably a step in the right direction.
josefx 6y ago
> that they are not giving people unique identifiers How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?
darren_ 6y ago
> Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something. This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on. Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around? (obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)
- tomjen3 6y ago
  If the browser is supposed to send the information, what are they going to do with those of US who do not use Chrome? Are there plans to force firefox to follow the plan, and how will they prevent others from, say, making an extension to mess with the cohort numbers?
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Presumably people would just block the ads instead? Either way I reckon it's the same thing stopping people from just sending random data over google-analytics. So, not a whole lot, other than whatever anti-spam mechanisms google bothered to put in place.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      >> just sending random data over google-analytics. Back when I was in the security field, I heard discussions about this sort of thing as a form of attack. The question was whether a computer that sent false or incorrect information was either engaging in a DOS attack or was violating the CFAA in that it was using false information to access a service. The DOS attack would be on the tracking system rather than a website resource, false information to degrade the effectiveness of the tracking system overall. The CFAA angle would be that participation in ads/tacking was part of the contract for accessing the 'free' service, that by blocking ads or sending false info the user is using a false credential to access the service. At the time, many thought that by using an ad-blocker that users were failing to pay, passively stealing website content. Those who sent false information were engaged in active theft.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        This is approximately the time when you go from passively not agreeing to be tracked or have your attention stolen or your computer compromised by ad networks to collaborating with your fellow citizens to destroy the business of the ad networks by making it difficult to impossible to operate. In truth if every free ad supported service ceased to exist the internet would go on none the less.
sjs382 6y ago
> without having read the article due to paywall, https://archive.vn/qlvcE https://archive.vn/qlvcE
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Solution #1: Remove Javascript and CSS. curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021 \ |sed -n '/<meta property=.og:title. content=./{s//<title>/;s/\" ./<\/title/;p;}' \ |egrep -o "(<p>.*</p>)|(<title>.*</title>)" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm Solution #2: Use browser that does not process it. links https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021 Unfortunately some countries block archive.is websites (e.g., at DNS-level), so archive links will not work for everybody.
  - jonahbenton 6y ago
    Useful, bookmarked your comment, thank you.
  - piplikoc 6y ago
    Solution #3: Use Bypass Paywalls Free extension that can remove paywalls from many of the big news sites. Works on Chrome, Edge and Mozilla. https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
      To each her own, but I see the complex browser such as Chrome, Edge and Mozilla as part of the problem. Javascript too. Neither is inherently problematic, but both are too often used to create problems for users (to serve advertisers' interests) rather than to solve them. For example, without Chrome/Edge/Mozilla plus Javascript, "paywall" does not work. Yet I can still read the WSJ article just fine with either Chrome/Edge/Mozilla nor Javascript. Much like a tech company that wants www readers to believe it is working to solve a problem www users are having that the tech company itself created (which, it just so happens, is not a problem at all for advertisers).
toxik 6y ago
I think an important question with the FLOC stuff is sort of brushed aside. So, you have millions of users, and you make it "k-anonymous", or "anonymous if you squint real good". Is it really possible to find k such that privacy is meaningfully preserved, given the heaps of other information you have? Say I belong to some cohort, and you know my IP address. I think this would be enough to fingerprint me reliably, never mind OS version, browser, plugins, etc.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > and you know my IP address https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... links to https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness for how they intend to handle this. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
sandworm101 6y ago
Even if they stay with cohorts, I assume people will be members of a variety of them. New parent. Lives in Springfield. Works at a power plant. Drives a car. Owns house. Horrible credit rating. Married with 2+ kids. Voted in last election. Ex military. Ex astronaut. Once purchased an effective baldness cure. How many seemingly large cohorts does it take before you are really talking about one clearly identifiable person?
- laurent92 6y ago
  > How many large cohorts does it take before identifying a person It takes 33 “perfect” yes/no questions to identify uniquely anyone on earth. It is seemingly large since each question splits the world in two. Of course this is in a perfect world, but I remember seeing quizzes which would guess any object given a few yes/no question. Or perhaps it was people.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F "Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon image of 24 people [...] Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates."
  - retzkek 6y ago
    > Of course this is in a perfect world, but I remember seeing quizzes which would guess any object given a few yes/no question. Or perhaps it was people. https://en.akinator.com/ https://en.akinator.com/
    - laurent92 6y ago
      This game is incredible. The question always seem to be unrelated to the person to guess, and suddenly it guessed perfectly.
      - williamscales 6y ago
kens 6y ago
Am I the only person who prefers well-targeted ads? If I see a targeted ad for a power supply IC on a random website, sometimes that's interesting and useful. On the other hand, Twitter is terrible at targeting and the ads are just annoying. Half are ads for random "as-seen-on-TV" quality products and the other half inexplicably think I am an oncologist.
- logshipper 6y ago
  I suppose there is nothing against well-targeted ads as long as the user has consented to having their data being used for targeted-advertising purposes. The current landscape, however, does not prioritize user-privacy and serves ads to unsuspecting users who do not always know the terms they agreed to. Moving away from the present opt-out to an opt-in model would give the user a say in how they would like to be tracked across the web. This is also what Apple is trying to do with its "nutritional-info" (not fanboying Apple here) labels. A user is free to consume the content they would like, but they have a right to know how their data is being used.
comboy 6y ago
Why is it compared to "random user grouping"? I'm probably misunderstanding something, because it doesn't seem hard to be few hundred percent more accurate than randomness.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
HDMI_Cable 6y ago
From what I've read on FLoC (not much so I may be wrong), wouldn't having anonymized ad-targeting be a good outcome? Google and websites still get their ad revenue, and we still get ad-supported products. I guess there's always the possibility of a badly-anonymized algorithm leaking data, but other than that it still seems like a step up from that invasion of privacy being a given, no? If I'm misinterpreting the jist of FLoC, let me know.

by btown 6y ago

phkahler 6y ago

Would that method benefit from Googles existing people database? I'm thinking it would, and maybe disabling current tracking will kick the ladder out from potential competitors! Still probably a step in the right direction.

josefx 6y ago

> that they are not giving people unique identifiers How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?

darren_ 6y ago

> Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something. This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on. Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around? (obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)

tomjen3 6y ago
If the browser is supposed to send the information, what are they going to do with those of US who do not use Chrome? Are there plans to force firefox to follow the plan, and how will they prevent others from, say, making an extension to mess with the cohort numbers?
- contravariant 6y ago
  Presumably people would just block the ads instead? Either way I reckon it's the same thing stopping people from just sending random data over google-analytics. So, not a whole lot, other than whatever anti-spam mechanisms google bothered to put in place.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> just sending random data over google-analytics. Back when I was in the security field, I heard discussions about this sort of thing as a form of attack. The question was whether a computer that sent false or incorrect information was either engaging in a DOS attack or was violating the CFAA in that it was using false information to access a service. The DOS attack would be on the tracking system rather than a website resource, false information to degrade the effectiveness of the tracking system overall. The CFAA angle would be that participation in ads/tacking was part of the contract for accessing the 'free' service, that by blocking ads or sending false info the user is using a false credential to access the service. At the time, many thought that by using an ad-blocker that users were failing to pay, passively stealing website content. Those who sent false information were engaged in active theft.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      This is approximately the time when you go from passively not agreeing to be tracked or have your attention stolen or your computer compromised by ad networks to collaborating with your fellow citizens to destroy the business of the ad networks by making it difficult to impossible to operate. In truth if every free ad supported service ceased to exist the internet would go on none the less.

sjs382 6y ago

> without having read the article due to paywall, https://archive.vn/qlvcE https://archive.vn/qlvcE

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Solution #1: Remove Javascript and CSS. curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021 \ |sed -n '/<meta property=.og:title. content=./{s//<title>/;s/\" ./<\/title/;p;}' \ |egrep -o "(<p>.*</p>)|(<title>.*</title>)" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm Solution #2: Use browser that does not process it. links https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021 Unfortunately some countries block archive.is websites (e.g., at DNS-level), so archive links will not work for everybody.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Useful, bookmarked your comment, thank you.
- piplikoc 6y ago
  Solution #3: Use Bypass Paywalls Free extension that can remove paywalls from many of the big news sites. Works on Chrome, Edge and Mozilla. https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    To each her own, but I see the complex browser such as Chrome, Edge and Mozilla as part of the problem. Javascript too. Neither is inherently problematic, but both are too often used to create problems for users (to serve advertisers' interests) rather than to solve them. For example, without Chrome/Edge/Mozilla plus Javascript, "paywall" does not work. Yet I can still read the WSJ article just fine with either Chrome/Edge/Mozilla nor Javascript. Much like a tech company that wants www readers to believe it is working to solve a problem www users are having that the tech company itself created (which, it just so happens, is not a problem at all for advertisers).

toxik 6y ago

I think an important question with the FLOC stuff is sort of brushed aside. So, you have millions of users, and you make it "k-anonymous", or "anonymous if you squint real good". Is it really possible to find k such that privacy is meaningfully preserved, given the heaps of other information you have? Say I belong to some cohort, and you know my IP address. I think this would be enough to fingerprint me reliably, never mind OS version, browser, plugins, etc.

jefftk 6y ago
> and you know my IP address https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... links to https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness for how they intend to handle this. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

sandworm101 6y ago

Even if they stay with cohorts, I assume people will be members of a variety of them. New parent. Lives in Springfield. Works at a power plant. Drives a car. Owns house. Horrible credit rating. Married with 2+ kids. Voted in last election. Ex military. Ex astronaut. Once purchased an effective baldness cure. How many seemingly large cohorts does it take before you are really talking about one clearly identifiable person?

laurent92 6y ago
> How many large cohorts does it take before identifying a person It takes 33 “perfect” yes/no questions to identify uniquely anyone on earth. It is seemingly large since each question splits the world in two. Of course this is in a perfect world, but I remember seeing quizzes which would guess any object given a few yes/no question. Or perhaps it was people.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%3F "Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon image of 24 people [...] Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates."
- retzkek 6y ago
  > Of course this is in a perfect world, but I remember seeing quizzes which would guess any object given a few yes/no question. Or perhaps it was people. https://en.akinator.com/ https://en.akinator.com/
  - laurent92 6y ago
    This game is incredible. The question always seem to be unrelated to the person to guess, and suddenly it guessed perfectly.
    - williamscales 6y ago

kens 6y ago

Am I the only person who prefers well-targeted ads? If I see a targeted ad for a power supply IC on a random website, sometimes that's interesting and useful. On the other hand, Twitter is terrible at targeting and the ads are just annoying. Half are ads for random "as-seen-on-TV" quality products and the other half inexplicably think I am an oncologist.

logshipper 6y ago
I suppose there is nothing against well-targeted ads as long as the user has consented to having their data being used for targeted-advertising purposes. The current landscape, however, does not prioritize user-privacy and serves ads to unsuspecting users who do not always know the terms they agreed to. Moving away from the present opt-out to an opt-in model would give the user a say in how they would like to be tracked across the web. This is also what Apple is trying to do with its "nutritional-info" (not fanboying Apple here) labels. A user is free to consume the content they would like, but they have a right to know how their data is being used.

comboy 6y ago

Why is it compared to "random user grouping"? I'm probably misunderstanding something, because it doesn't seem hard to be few hundred percent more accurate than randomness.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

HDMI_Cable 6y ago

From what I've read on FLoC (not much so I may be wrong), wouldn't having anonymized ad-targeting be a good outcome? Google and websites still get their ad revenue, and we still get ad-supported products. I guess there's always the possibility of a badly-anonymized algorithm leaking data, but other than that it still seems like a step up from that invasion of privacy being a given, no? If I'm misinterpreting the jist of FLoC, let me know.