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Google is testing its new ad targeting tech in millions of browsers
- gerbler 6y agoI'm really missing why FLoC is a bad thing. Isn't bundling users into buckets good for individual privacy? In theory if the bucket is too small you are identifiable, but my understanding is that the entire premise of this approach is to ensure that is not the case.
- sneak 6y agoThey're made available to every website you visit, according to the article.
- blub 6y agoAnything which provides more signal to advertisers is a bad thing.
- alwaysdoit 6y agoDisagree. The abandonment of advertising in favor of paywalls in media is directly contributing to the increase in polarization and consumption of disinformation. Quality journalism is getting harder and harder to access. People might subscribe to one or two, but they are unlikely to shell out for a publication that does not align with their preexisting views. Meanwhile the propaganda and fake news remains free to read.
- realusername 6y agoAdvertising is directly contributing to the increase in polarization. If you want to get ad revenue, you have to produce in increasing quantities every year (by directly reducing the quality of the content) and use shady tactics like clickbait and polarizing topics to increase page views. None of those issues apply to paid journalism.
- dialtone 6y agoAre you perhaps misunderstanding how the newsfeed works? People can write all clickbait they want, always have, but it wasn't until that content was forced in your face by Facebook's newsfeed algorithm, or youtube recommendation algorithm or twitters feed algorithm that you are really exposed to that stuff. And even without clickbait stuff people search for the news that satisfies them and their value system. All of this happens on data voluntarily shared with the platforms people complain about like Facebook, and there's no end to this in sight. Advertising in this forum is at the same time useless and barely works (cue the 50% advertising is wasted, don't know which one, and other similar sentences) and the most powerful tool for mind control ever existed.
- realusername 6y agoFacebook and Youtube are also powered by advertising and suffer from the exact same issue. Content producers using these platforms have an incentive to create the maximum amount of content they can and use polarizing topics to get more views. Any revenue model based on the number of views (like advertising) is fundamentally flawed and will suffer from the exact same problem.
- HWR_14 6y agoAdvertising and targeted advertising are not the same. Youtube creators bake in ads relative to the videos (or not) via sponsors and they make more money off that than the ads Google puts in front of the videos.
- kenny11 6y agoIt seems that the same argument could be made about hyper-targeted advertising. In the days where everyone was watching the same network newscasts or reading the same newspapers, they were also all seeing the same advertisements. The trend towards segmenting people into ever-smaller classes to serve them more targeted ads is another cause of, not a solution to polarization.
- adamsvystun 6y agoFLoC will still give a lot of info about you. A thousand people is not a lot. Plus, because FLoCs change you can track the changes and potentially figure out more about your user. The most important part is that FLoCs will be accessible to every website that you visit it seems. If that’s correct than it’s completely different than when your behavior is known only to Google.
- dialtone 6y agoNo, you can't really do any of that. A single FLoC ID, while having access to no other identifier, is not gonna say anything about your past history to anyone. It's just useful to correlate to actual advertising campaign performance. Most traditional adtech, used to targeting attributes, is quite puzzled at how to use this at the moment given they'll all need to invest in machine learning because these IDs aren't interpretable. The specifications of this stuff are all in the open.
- Lorkki 6y ago> A single FLoC ID, while having access to no other identifier That's the key though, isn't it? While I can see that the intentions may be good, this isn't being released into a vacuum, but rather to a world where all of that other tracking infrastructure already exists.
- dialtone 6y agoOnly during the transition, when all is said and done there are no other identifiers of merit, and since this one can change pretty frequently it doesn't really identify much. One day I receive a request that says you are group 12345, in 1 hour you are 12346 instead because the algorithm recalculated your FLoC... Not sure what anyone can tell about that without knowing the group ids meanings, which likely not even google will know since this is going to be a clustering algorithm anyway.
- leereeves 6y ago> Only during the transition, when all is said and done there are no other identifiers of merit, and since this one can change pretty frequently it doesn't really identify much. As long as browser fingerprinting exists it will be possible to track the FLoC cohorts a person belongs to over time and learn much more about them than a single FLoC cohort reveals. But AFAIK, FLoC is only replacing third-party cookies; browser fingerprinting will still be possible.
- HWR_14 6y agoIf you currently are minimizing your footprint, then this is a larger footprint (bad). If you currently have everything on by default, this is still a larger footprint because it's supplementing everything else, but may eventually replace it with a smaller footprint. Which could be better than the status quo (privacy-wise) but isn't better than turning off third-party cookies and not replacing them with anything.
- dialtone 6y agoHow? How would fingerprinting use this? It's formed by data used in the past 7 days and the bigger the space of FLoCs the more likely it is that it changes frequently, for example every day if not more frequently. The fingerprinting would fail to recover the same code at least once a day unless you always visit the exact same sites every day and never visit a new one. fingerprinting needs a stable state from the browser to work, not something that changes arbitrarily.
- HWR_14 6y agoI'm not sure if it will aid in fingerprinting, although it is more bits of uniqueness. Even with sub-week persistent I'm pretty sure that helps if fingerprinting is used to track movements between sites, like ad click through rates or for intra-site telemetry. Heck, resolution is still considered valuable for fingerprinting and that changes when people reorganize their desktops. But beyond simply fingerprinting, it still is providing some tracking. I've seen a lot of "anonymized" data turn out to be not so anonymized in practice, or reversible to a large degree.
- gbil 6y agoSince Edge is using the same (mostly) source code, can we assume that some of the test users are from the Edge side too - or other Chromium based browsers - or limited to Chrome? Quick search didn't clarify this
- EMM_386 6y agoNote this all occurs client-side, which means that it only affects browsers that implement FLoC. You can opt-out of this (for now) in Chrome by disabling third-party cookies. You can also simply use another browser such as Firefox.
- traskjd 6y agoOr (hopefully) Microsoft Edge - Chromium engine, without this (and quite a lot of other Goog tracking code).
- adamcstephens 6y agoThis assumes Microsoft hasn’t replaced all the Google tracking with their own.
- snovv_crash 6y agoWhat would stop a malicious client from implementing a noisy FLoC to 'poison the well'?
- dialtone 6y agoYou could do that, technically there are other APIs like Trust Token API to protect against malicious clients, but one client in a giant cohort is unlikely to cause much damage anyway so it doesn't matter... And this is anyway going to be machine learning driven so unless you poison all of the FLoCs a lot it may end up being discovered or the FLoC simply not considered performant by a specific ad campaign.
- snovv_crash 6y agoOk. But what if, say, Mozilla did this?
- adamsvystun 6y agoDoes eff want a future with no targeted ads based on user info or do they have a proposal for targeting that they like?
- mjevans 6y agoI want a future without ads. I'll hope for one with ads only targeted based on content, like they were in the old days. Edit: PS: I when I'm searching for a product, placed results (which reasonably match my intent or possible related needs) aren't ads. Those are helpful suggestions curated by payment and hopefully regulated match.
- dmortin 6y agoUntargeted ads means less revenue, so if we go that way prepare for free sites going away or having to pay for some features. E.g. basic Gmail will be free, but if you want something like Undo Send, etc. then you'll have to pay a monthly fee for it. And these fees from the various sites will add up quickly.
- krageon 6y ago> Untargeted ads means less revenue This isn't at all clear, mostly because every "ad" professional I've talked to IRL is as allergic to real data as some people are to peanuts. What you've quoted is a sales pitch.
- dialtone 6y agoIt's not just clear, it's Cristal Clear™. Here's a review of all the relevant literature on the topic: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PKHVtO6hgwBJS1vafLyvG_lwupLhfCSelzczvltxjqc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PKHVtO6hgwBJS1vafLyv...
- krageon 6y agoThe literature here is of poor quality. For a salient example, look at this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3020503 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3020503 Where a giant group is compared to an extremely tiny group and the differences between them are used to make sweeping generalizations about everyone. When this is the quality to expect, it's just good practice to be skeptical. Edit: Even if this weren't the case, the enormous spread of estimates when it comes to revenue impact really says it all.
- radiKal07 6y agoGood thing I switched to Safari, I don't miss anything from Chrome
- tluyben2 6y agoSince I got the m1, I opted for safari too: much better battery life. Seems this is a nice added benefit.
- Varriount 6y agoFor those who feel a bit out-of-the-loop, this excerpt pretty much sums up why the EFF feels that this is, if not worse than 3rd party cookies, not significantly better: The proposal rests on the assumption that people in “sensitive categories” will visit specific “sensitive” websites, and that people who aren’t in those groups will not visit said sites. But behavior correlates with demographics in unintuitive ways. It's highly likely that certain demographics are going to visit a different subset of the web than other demographics are, and that such behavior will not be captured by Google’s “sensitive sites” framing. For example, people with depression may exhibit similar browsing behaviors, but not necessarily via something as explicit and direct as, for example, visiting “depression.org.” Meanwhile, tracking companies are well-equipped to gather traffic from millions of users, link it to data about demographics or behavior, and decode which cohorts are linked to which sensitive traits. Google’s website-based system, as proposed, has no way of stopping that. The way I interpret this is that, based on your browsing history in Chrome (or any browser that implements this kind of functionality) you are placed into a number of categories (or, if one reverses the metaphor, a number of descriptive tags are attached to you). Google is aiming to ensure that certain categories/tags that might be considered sensitive (mental state, physical illnesses, etc.) will be blocked. (To be clear, this is my interpretation of what they are stating, not an assertion of fact) The EFF is arguing that this isn't really that straightforward, as sensitive details can still be inferred from non-sensitive details. What I'm curious about is, who is doing all the ID generation, categorization, and data centralization? Or is Chrome just going to calculate everything itself, then send the data to sites that ask for it?
- dialtone 6y agoThis isn't how FLOC works though, the EFF persists in the misunderstanding of this technology. A FLoC is a single ID per browser and it's not human readable, the algorithm to determine this will run in the browser so your data will never leave it. There's no real way for someone to "reverse engineer" the ID, it's just a random set of bits not "people-who-like-shoes". Last, and I may be wrong here given this announcement, FLoC isn't part of Chrome until Chrome 91 in june, at least I think this is what the Chrome team said Tuesday at the W3C meeting so I'm not sure what this refers to, but it shouldn't be the browser side.
- dgan 6y agoI feel like a more acceptable solution would be simply to ask user un what category he wants to be put in?.. I know may sound naive, but why not? This effectively solves the question of optout as i can choose to use default value so that i am indistinguishable from thousands other people This also clearly allows for some targeted ads that user does actually care about. I don't mind seeing ads for technology, but all those "You wouldn't believe this!! 11", and "Look, penis!!" are just insult to humanity. I know it's still ads. But i have an impression it's ao much better solution
- nextstep 6y agoAs an iOS and Mac user, I use Safari now 100% for browsing. It has basically all of the features I need. I think Firefox has improved significantly in recent years as well, but I haven't used it in a while.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoA www browser that sends your browsing history to an advertising services company. I can recall a time when this would not be acceptable to www users. Today, www users accept a www browser provided by an advertising services company that, as one might expect, records and uses your browsing history to sell online ad services.
- dialtone 6y agoThis thing explicitly does not send your history to anyone so I'm not sure what you are commenting here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- emouryto 6y ago> records and uses your browsing history to sell online ad services. Such lack of imagination... The recorded data build behavioral profiles of the whole globe on multiple dimensions.
- Goz3rr 6y agoI've recently been getting google ads for customized tshirts that either have my first or last name _on the shirt in the actual ad_ [1] I absolutely hate it and can't find anything about it online, other than 2-3 people on twitter complaining about it as well. No idea how they're even doing this or how I can disable it. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/cRSZFwK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/cRSZFwK.jpg
- zuccs 6y agoI assume it’s done with services that have user data, you can then collate the surname + emails, and create a separate remarketing list per surname. Then you target that list with your surname-specific ads.
- dmortin 6y agoMost people want things for free. If you asked them if they want free access with ads or paid access without ads I guess most of them would choose the first option.
- eagleal 6y agoThe privacy and sensitive stuff seems like an excuse. As of now it looks like the implementor (Google Ads) might have a competitive advantage over other advertisers and platforms, since they have direct access to both the ID generator/categorizer and a wider initial base. Any different advertising platform will always be inferior by definition.
- LordHeini 6y agoSince the tracking runs on the client now. Would it not be easy to write a browser plugin reporting fake flocs? Not sure if it would suffice to just overwrite the document.interestCohort(); function and have it report something trollish. Since a cohort is rather small could a botnet be sufficiently large, to create its own private cohorts and mess up a lot of add deliveries?
- visarga 6y agoSo, before we were being followed opportunistically by many advertisers, but no one had full information. Now Google is going to classify all of us for any company who wants to know. That's a net loss of privacy. The flock system sounds like the Chinese social credit score. I'm wondering what things will be conditioned on FlockID. There are going to be elite flocks and worthless flocks. "Sorry, our services are available only to flock-3453 and flock-2234. Losers like flock-23232 need not come."
- teitoklien 6y agoOr even a bit more sneaky , sorry but web requests from Flock-3453 is going to be served at a higher priority than flock-2234. your youtube is slow ? , oh honey Just click on these few websites to change your flock id to one of a more advertisement friendly one. Looks like they found one the most computationally cheapest way to discriminate against users on the internet. One identifier to discriminate them all :)
- PoignardAzur 6y agoThat's not remotely how it works.
- danmur 6y agoI'd be happy to pay for a browser with my interests at heart at this point. Maybe this is an improvement but it's a problem that doesn't need to exist.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoLet's hope Google's FLoC is as successful as their switch to Google+
- magicroot75 6y agoCould someone help me understand this? Will a user be assigned one floc ID, or multiple? Or is a floc ID a unique ID to a single user? It seems like if each user only gets a single floc grouping, that this is more private than a system like FB, where any given user could be part of thousands of different targetable "interest groups." Am I missing something? On FB, for instance, I could be targeted for liking Infinite Jest. And separately for like Mountain Biking. And separately for living in Pennsylvania. It seems like Google is doing a lot to obscure the user information into a data black box. Maybe I don't get the idea.
- butz 6y agoHow about just adding a setting and letting user choose his own interests? If this month I'm looking for a new laptop, there's a good chance that after purchase my "interests" might change.