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This 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, t

This 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Nah 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 ago
    I disagree. Those parasites are what destroyed the internet and turned it into the disaster we have now.
    - dialtone 6y ago
      I 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 ago
      I 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.
      - krageon 6y ago
        The world isn't divided into just two choices for anything, including this. The fact that you can see only two isn't anyone's problem but yours.
        dialtone 6y ago
        What are you talking about? Advertising and marketing are among the oldest concepts and jobs in history and have since the early days of tv or journalism paid for free content. If you have a new business idea that represents this third way... What are you doing here? Build a business and become a billionaire.
        why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
        Now I see the problem. You never experienced what the internet was like when it wasn't as ad-infested as it is now. It might be hard to comprehend, but people who were passionated about something and wanted to make a website about that paid for it out of their own pockets without focusing mainly on 'monetization', 'ad revenue', 'SEO' and similar garbage. Unbelievable, isn't it?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Via experiment, ad businesses can determine which 'random sets of bits' lead to good click-through rates and such.
Varriount 6y ago
Hm, if that is the case, how will advertisers get any utility out of this? How does the categorization fit into advertisers interests?
- dialtone 6y ago
  It's currently part of the conversation at W3C, advertisers aren't particularly happy about FLoC either, they'll need to build a lot of ML to correlate the FLoCs with their customer's campaigns, one by one, until they find the group that performs. They'll need to develop techniques for this, for example using machine learning and train their models. That's not how this stuff is typically bought today. In particular they aren't happy also about the 3rd party cookie comparison because it just makes no sense, not sure why the PR focuses on that given that this is minimum 3-4 orders of magnitude less precise than 3rd party cookies, targeting a FLoC is going to be like targeting a zip code, hardly THAT privacy invasive.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > targeting a FLoC is going to be like targeting a zip code No, it's going to be like targeting by zip code when you already can target by other means as well (fingerprinting, IP address). So it's going to make fingerprinting easier.
cyphers 6y ago
The passage quoted above refers to the way google plans to audit FLoC, not FLoC itself. Each browser is assigned a single floc ID, which is (for now) a 50-bit hash that is not human readable on its own. But the floc ID is intended to capture something meaningful about browsing behavior. Two users with similar browsing history are likely to have similar, if not the same, floc IDs. Floc IDs which are close together (hamming distance-wise) also reflect similar browsing histories. (http://matpalm.com/resemblance/simhash/ http://matpalm.com/resemblance/simhash/) It will be totally possible to gather data about what kind of people belong to a particular floc -- provided that you operate a large website or ad network. It will probably not be possible for normal people. There's a risk that advertisers will learn that a particular floc ID corresponds to a "sensitive category" of users. That's what google is trying to prevent. Google plans to audit floc IDs for correlation with visits to sensitive websites. In order to do so, it's assigning a "sensitivity" label to certain websites, and then applying that label to each user who visits those websites. Then it will run analyses to see whether users with a particular floc ID are more likely to have a particular label. Floc IDs that correlate too strongly with a particluar label will be thrown out. The passage is attempting to explain why this does not prevent adtech from learning other meaningful things about flocs -- for example, that users in a specific floc are disproportionately female, or Muslim, or suffering from depression. As for whether FLoC is in chrome, see the origin trial page here: https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/213920982300098561 https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/21392...
- dialtone 6y ago
  All good points, but they don't change the conclusion I wrote though, you effectively further specified the lengths to which Google is going to prevent any potential bad correlation to sensitive categories. Of course there will be correlation of some sort, they aren't random groups, but so long as you can't tell sensitive categories, you can only observe that a group seems more interested in a particular advertiser products. You can't tell their browsing history, just their interests. Regarding the trial, yeah I know that origin thing is up, and the minutes for yesterday's W3C IWABG meeting aren't going to be out until next week, but the team working on this stuff at Google said that the trial up there is kind of fake and the code isn't merged in Chrome yet and won't be until 91, at some point I have to trust the engineers working on this stuff more than the rest. [edit]: To be clear, I don't mean that there's no experiment going on, I just mean that it's not the browser running it, that the removal of 3rd party cookies as a way to opt-out likely is due to the fact that they may be relying on server-side computation to do this experiment rather than the browser, I wouldn't see why the browser would care about cookies to track your history, it's already stored in the browser.

why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago

If 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 ago
Nah 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 ago
  I disagree. Those parasites are what destroyed the internet and turned it into the disaster we have now.
  - dialtone 6y ago
    I 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 ago
    I 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.
    - krageon 6y ago
      The world isn't divided into just two choices for anything, including this. The fact that you can see only two isn't anyone's problem but yours.
      - dialtone 6y ago
        What are you talking about? Advertising and marketing are among the oldest concepts and jobs in history and have since the early days of tv or journalism paid for free content. If you have a new business idea that represents this third way... What are you doing here? Build a business and become a billionaire.
        why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
        Now I see the problem. You never experienced what the internet was like when it wasn't as ad-infested as it is now. It might be hard to comprehend, but people who were passionated about something and wanted to make a website about that paid for it out of their own pockets without focusing mainly on 'monetization', 'ad revenue', 'SEO' and similar garbage. Unbelievable, isn't it?
UncleMeat 6y ago
Via experiment, ad businesses can determine which 'random sets of bits' lead to good click-through rates and such.

Varriount 6y ago

Hm, if that is the case, how will advertisers get any utility out of this? How does the categorization fit into advertisers interests?

dialtone 6y ago
It's currently part of the conversation at W3C, advertisers aren't particularly happy about FLoC either, they'll need to build a lot of ML to correlate the FLoCs with their customer's campaigns, one by one, until they find the group that performs. They'll need to develop techniques for this, for example using machine learning and train their models. That's not how this stuff is typically bought today. In particular they aren't happy also about the 3rd party cookie comparison because it just makes no sense, not sure why the PR focuses on that given that this is minimum 3-4 orders of magnitude less precise than 3rd party cookies, targeting a FLoC is going to be like targeting a zip code, hardly THAT privacy invasive.
- visarga 6y ago
  > targeting a FLoC is going to be like targeting a zip code No, it's going to be like targeting by zip code when you already can target by other means as well (fingerprinting, IP address). So it's going to make fingerprinting easier.

cyphers 6y ago

The passage quoted above refers to the way google plans to audit FLoC, not FLoC itself. Each browser is assigned a single floc ID, which is (for now) a 50-bit hash that is not human readable on its own. But the floc ID is intended to capture something meaningful about browsing behavior. Two users with similar browsing history are likely to have similar, if not the same, floc IDs. Floc IDs which are close together (hamming distance-wise) also reflect similar browsing histories. (http://matpalm.com/resemblance/simhash/ http://matpalm.com/resemblance/simhash/) It will be totally possible to gather data about what kind of people belong to a particular floc -- provided that you operate a large website or ad network. It will probably not be possible for normal people. There's a risk that advertisers will learn that a particular floc ID corresponds to a "sensitive category" of users. That's what google is trying to prevent. Google plans to audit floc IDs for correlation with visits to sensitive websites. In order to do so, it's assigning a "sensitivity" label to certain websites, and then applying that label to each user who visits those websites. Then it will run analyses to see whether users with a particular floc ID are more likely to have a particular label. Floc IDs that correlate too strongly with a particluar label will be thrown out. The passage is attempting to explain why this does not prevent adtech from learning other meaningful things about flocs -- for example, that users in a specific floc are disproportionately female, or Muslim, or suffering from depression. As for whether FLoC is in chrome, see the origin trial page here: https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/213920982300098561 https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/21392...

dialtone 6y ago
All good points, but they don't change the conclusion I wrote though, you effectively further specified the lengths to which Google is going to prevent any potential bad correlation to sensitive categories. Of course there will be correlation of some sort, they aren't random groups, but so long as you can't tell sensitive categories, you can only observe that a group seems more interested in a particular advertiser products. You can't tell their browsing history, just their interests. Regarding the trial, yeah I know that origin thing is up, and the minutes for yesterday's W3C IWABG meeting aren't going to be out until next week, but the team working on this stuff at Google said that the trial up there is kind of fake and the code isn't merged in Chrome yet and won't be until 91, at some point I have to trust the engineers working on this stuff more than the rest. [edit]: To be clear, I don't mean that there's no experiment going on, I just mean that it's not the browser running it, that the removal of 3rd party cookies as a way to opt-out likely is due to the fact that they may be relying on server-side computation to do this experiment rather than the browser, I wouldn't see why the browser would care about cookies to track your history, it's already stored in the browser.