6 ms·
Am I FLoCed?
- tyingq 6y agoClever name, I suppose, since the implication is that we're sheep.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alisonkisk 6y agoFlock means "group"
- mattowen_uk 6y ago...and sheep in a group are called flocks.
- cybert00th 6y agoI haven't consciously chosen to use Chrome in so long, I can't actually remember the last time I did. Firefox for the win, every time!
- zshrdlu 6y agoMe too, I just never switched when everyone else did. It's always just worked for me.
- politelemon 6y agoI should never have switched. I spent time jumping between every browser I saw, learning their workflows and quirks, but I've returned to Firefox. The one lesson I've settled on for myself is: if I can't uninstall a browser, I won't trust it.
- dathinab 6y agoI had to use it because Teams ist actively ignoring years of best practice for web development and just decided to boycott any noon IE/Chrome/Chromium browser instead of doing feature detection and shims. Most ironic screen sharing does work best in Firefox under wayland as chromium based browser still don't have proper pipewire support (it's experimental and uses an outdated pipe write api, you can adapt it and it works fine but seriously given covid-19 Google should have put some resources into).
- mam2 6y agoWorks until it doesnt. Last uodate on ubuntu 18 completely destroyed my firefox and i had ro switch to chromium
- mam2 6y ago@Downvoters why downvote the simple truth ? Firefox is not perfect in terms of usability anyway.
- izacus 6y agoEFF is really deciding to die on a hill on a feature where all the tracking is moved to your owned device instead of being held on some foreign servers? Despite that giving your software full control what it collects and reports to the servers? Even Apple uses this kind of federated learning approach for their data collection needs. Is EFF fighting to improve privacy or are they only interested in attacking certain corporations?
- tareqak 6y agoI could very well argue that ad sellers are trying to die on the hill where they try to track their users for increasingly better ad-targeting to the point where some instances of that targeting becomes downright scary and/or illegal.
- izacus 6y agoAccording to the articles I've read, this will actually decrease the quality of targeting in exchange for keeping the data locally. Is that wrong?
- Macha 6y agoYou're assuming this is also responsible for the decrease in targeting quality. Apple and Mozilla have implemented similar anti-tracking changes in ITP and ETP without a similar compensatory system like FLoC and GDPR enforcement is slowly moving into gear hence Google's redesigned consent dialog after their latest fine which puts making an ad tracking decision on the front page. What advertisers have is going away, whether FLoC gets implemented or not, FLoC is Google throwing the advertising industry a bone so they don't get accused of anti-competitive behaviour by implementing rules in their OS and browser businesses that will affect them less due to all their first party users when customer and regulatory pressure forces them into following Apple
- tareqak 6y agoHow about not tracking users period? Billboard ads and street ads are still things advertisers buy even though they cannot track individuals.
- Tistron 6y agoCould firefox (or chrome) not implement this and let the user decide what category of ads they'd like to see? Or choose to have it randomly selected per website? Or respond with some value like "random ad please".
- gillesjacobs 6y agoWhy would Firefox implement this? No one but Google has anything to gain from this. Except for that Mozilla receives funding through a Google search deal, but I hope they manage to remain independent and keep tracking out of the browser.
- bassdropvroom 6y agoI can see this being a plus if it's randomised. Every request posts random garbage, similar to resist fingerprinting. From my naive understanding, it sounds like it would be easier to avoid tracking compared to all the cookie trickery that Firefox does.
- Tistron 6y agoMy thought was that it may help further an argument that the web user themself can choose and declare what type of ads they want to see if people insist on showing "relevant" ads. But perhaps have fewer than 33000 categories to chose from.
- bionhoward 6y agoHow does FLoC compare to prior forms of tracking? I thought the point of federated learning was to improve privacy by obscuring folks' data amongst a cohort of others, like Tor (or firing squads...)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"For example, a site can opt out of all FLoC cohort calculation by sending the HTTP response header: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()" https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc Added to proxy config. http-response add-header "Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()"
- kerng 6y agoClient side there is also the DNT header which everyone, including Google is happily ignoring. So I'd imagine things will get ignored similarly here.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoYou are suggesting that Chrome will ignore this header sent from a site. You are suggesting that sites will not be able to opt-out. Seems like the easierst way to opt-out of FLoC is to use a browser that does not support it. I already do that. It does not even support CSS or Javascript. I love it. With client-side header "DNT", sites can ignore it. With server-side header "Permissions-Policy", browsers or other programs that make HTTP requests can ignore it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoWrong syntax. http-response add-header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()"
- ghughes 6y agoCloudflare and Fastly should step up and add this header for all domains by default. That would probably be enough to kill this idiotic mal-feature.