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I'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 identif

I'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 ago
They're made available to every website you visit, according to the article.
blub 6y ago
Anything which provides more signal to advertisers is a bad thing.
- alwaysdoit 6y ago
  Disagree. 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 ago
    Advertising 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 ago
      Are 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 ago
        Facebook 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 ago
    Advertising 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 ago
    It 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 ago
FLoC 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 ago
  No, 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 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. 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 ago
If 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 ago
  How? 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 ago
    I'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.

sneak 6y ago

They're made available to every website you visit, according to the article.

blub 6y ago

Anything which provides more signal to advertisers is a bad thing.

alwaysdoit 6y ago
Disagree. 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 ago
  Advertising 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 ago
    Are 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 ago
      Facebook 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 ago
  Advertising 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 ago
  It 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 ago

FLoC 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 ago
No, 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 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. 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 ago

If 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 ago
How? 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 ago
  I'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.