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For 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 significantl
by Varriount 6y ago
For 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.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoIf it's just 'random set of bits', how Google plans to use it? For it to be useful, they must have a way to decompose it to back to those categories mentioned in grandparent post, otherwise how are they going to sell it to those advertisment parasites, I mean companies?
- dialtone 6y agoNah you don't need to decompose it. The only thing that matters is if a given FLoC has more probability to see its members click on ads, or convert on ads, from a given advertiser. This can be discovered with ML with enough data/observations. Nothing else is really necessary. Those parasites pay for the vast majority of the internet you likely use and benefit from.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agoI disagree. Those parasites are what destroyed the internet and turned it into the disaster we have now.
- dialtone 6y agoI don't think you are being constructive or bringing arguments that support your thesis so I'm going to stop here to reply.
- krageon 6y ago> Those parasites pay for Yes, but I don't want them to. Of course, I don't have a choice. And the people that keep supporting them keep helping them work their fingers deeper, slowly touching and corrupting everything that I might still find enjoyable there. That's what makes them parasites. They take what's good and they make it worse.
- dialtone 6y agoI think parasites are those that want the web to be simply free and have free access to whatever they want regardless of the infrastructure cost of running the internet. It's the actual definition of parasites to feed off of a host organism. Pay and subscribe to all the sites you read or video sites you watch and let's see how many sites are left that you read. Incidentally I subscribe to a lot of online news sites and video sites to avoid ads where they bother me or to support the journalism, but not everyone can afford this, especially smaller publishers.