18 ms·

Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

378 points by brunoluiz 6y ago

riq_ 6y ago
care to explain what is Brave and what is FLoC?
- geofft 6y ago
  Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) : > Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators along with the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they earned. Quoting https://amifloced.org/ https://amifloced.org/ : > Third-party cookies are the technology that powers much of the surveillance-advertising business today. But cookies are on their way out, and Google is trying to design a way for advertisers to keep targeting users based on their web browsing once cookies are gone. It's come up with FLoC. > FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web.
- mcrittenden 6y ago
  Brave [0] is a web browser, built from Chromium, but with built in ad and tracker blocking. FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. The third party cookie is dying, and FLoC is a way for companies to group people together and track them, rather than tracking individuals. Here's more info about that [1] and here's an EFF article about why it's dangerous [2]. [0] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- morelisp 6y ago
  FLoC is a way to make Google's ad network's targeting worth comparatively more than other ad networks'. Brave is an other ad network.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    Can you expand on how Brave is an ad network?
    - morelisp 6y ago
      https://brave.com/brave-ads/ https://brave.com/brave-ads/ Company Overview & Core Offering Brave is the first global digital ad platform built for privacy, offering advertisers the opportunity to participate in a premium, brand safe, and opt-in ad ecosystem, designed for a future without 3rd party cookies.
- _eLRIC 6y ago
  Brave claims to be a privacy oriented web browser. It is apparently based on Chromium and someone identified a Chromium feature that was phoning home (I.e. Google servers) with some informations reducing user anonimity (At least that's what I understood from a quick look)
rq1 6y ago
For those who like me wonder what is FLoC : https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc
mcint 6y ago
FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts which aims to target advertising better without it directly relying on singularly personal information. https://web.dev/floc/ https://web.dev/floc/ FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox/floc https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...
- londons_explore 6y ago
  If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      I'd also like to support websites I visit, though, if I don't have the money to directly donate to them and if I am going to purchase a product anyways (think visiting an amazon product page, leaving it for a day, then clicking an ad for it to give x% to the website). Many websites today wouldn't exist without ads since a lot of their traffic is people who don't go out of their way to donate to websites they find useful. If I can do this without giving up privacy I'll turn off my ad blocker (and I already do for websites I find useful).
      - jeffgreco 6y ago
amboo7 6y ago
Brave is a web browser, and I found this in the code: federated_learning::kFederatedLearningOfCohorts, I suppose that's what FLoC stands for.
dataflow 6y ago
Is there any evidence behind the idea that FLoC is more privacy-preserving than third-party cookies? Intuitively that is not obvious to me at all, especially given there are so many other fingerprinting techniques it could be combined with.
- dialtone 6y ago
  You can't use FLoC ID for fingerprinting, it changes continuously.
  - dataflow 6y ago
    Interesting, didn't know that. In that case then how does it identify a cohort in a useful manner? Surely websites will need to temporally tie together the values to be able to target ads?
    - dialtone 6y ago
      The cohort semantic meaning is stable, although not disclosed an ML system would learn its correlation to a given goal. Cohort membership changes pretty frequently instead. So the system may put all people that browse mostly golf sites together in cohort 12345 that only the algorithm knows it's about golf sites, people enter and leave that cohort on a daily basis and you can only be a member of a single cohort at a time.
      - dataflow 6y ago
        Why would the cohort membership change frequently? Isn't it based on your browsing habits? I don't think my habits change frequently—do most people's? Also, even if I take for granted that everyone's cohort changes daily, how does that imply anonymity? Like say my habit is that I check emails a ton on Monday, go on YouTube on Saturday, read the news on Sunday, etc... so my habits are changing daily, okay, but not weekly, right? Or maybe I do them in a different order on another week, but I'm not going to develop 1000 different habits across 1000 days, right? Shouldn't some kind of frequency analysis provide fairly consistent results?
mistrial9 6y ago
FLoC is new to me .. a quick check Chrome Browser on a chrome-book shows Federated Learning of Cohorts - Version: 1.0.6 Chrome : 89.0.4389.116 (Official Build) (64-bit)
mikl 6y ago
Good to see Brave sticking to their privacy guns. FLoC is a brazen attempt for Big Ad (aka. Google and its ilk) to keep their spying-on-users gravy train going, now that GDPR and similar laws are making their old methods illegal (without consent). No one wants to consent to being spied on, so FLoC is circumnavigating the GDPR consent requirements, letting them spy on all Chrome-users without consent.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Only in a world of Google dominance could Brave be seen as the good guy.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Except with FLOC you can watch your network connection in/out and see that, instead of a persistent identifier being used to track you, you only send your interest categories. FLOC's intent is to keep their money making operation afloat, but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users.
  - xvector 6y ago
    > but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users. Your FLOC cohort is a summary of your web browsing activity. FLOC doesn't solve the privacy problems that trackers create - it just hands them your browsing history on a silver platter.
    - yunohn 6y ago
      It’s literally a cohort ID? Where did you get “hands them your browsing history on a silver platter” from?
      - type0 6y ago
        because combined with browser fingerprinting it is exactly the outcome
phnofive 6y ago
The recursive irony here is that Alphabet implemented FLoC to put a moat around tracking adtech, and Brave consumes Chromium for its own means of generating revenue from vending a browser (BAT), so of course there’s no reason to propagate FLoC.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I don't understand why tracking is not being considered as mechanism helping companies to manipulate consumers into buying their stuff, essentially amounting to fraud? If you were going to track someone in real life and manipulating them into buying something, you would certainly end up in jail, so why is this allowed over the internet? Because consumers don't see companies who stalk them? In my opinion the whole tracking business should be illegal.
  - comboy 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_location_analytics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_location_analytics
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Isn't advertising, by definition, manipulating customers into buying stuff?
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Advertising is providing information about the product, so that consumer can make an informed decision whether to buy it or not. Creating messaging tailored specifically to an individual exploiting various vulnerabilities or their situation is not.
kamaitachi 6y ago
Bad Voltage did a good show recently dedicated to FLoC. https://www.badvoltage.org/2021/04/01/3x26/ https://www.badvoltage.org/2021/04/01/3x26/
Ygg2 6y ago
I wonder how long, before Google sabotages Chromium to hurt Brave and other downwards forks?
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >Brave ..... downwards forks Very fitting.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    Would downstream forks work better as a word there?
fsflover 6y ago
Check whether your Chrome is FLoCed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313.
gerash 6y ago
What is wrong with FloC and what's a better alternative?
- bww 6y ago
  Your question assumes that transparent, behavior-based, cross-site user interest tracking is somehow essential functionality for the web and we just have to find the right way to do it. I think most people who are criticizing FLoC would challenge the idea that this class of functionality needs to or should exist at all.
  - gerash 6y ago
    Content creators want to get paid as much as anyone else and it's either through direct payment by the consumers or by embedding advertisement in their content. All this FloC, third party cookies, etc. are efforts to make that advertisement route more efficient. So my question is what are the critics proposing instead? Get rid of ads and just ask the audience to pay per view or make everything a subscription? Not paying content creators (ad blocking) is certainly not a sustainable alternative.
    - hackerfromthefu 6y ago
      Simple advertisements like billboards. One image, no stalker tracking, no global user profiles, no malware, and no animation or movement. Advertising was effective as an image or text that shows the reader a value proposition. What we have these days is stalkers and information rapists pretending to be advertisers.
    - totony 6y ago
      The reason non-tracking ads pay less is that tracking ads are now the norm. If standards/laws were implemented to protect privacy and block such tracking, content providers (if they are so inclined) would make as much money with non-tracking ads as they do now with tracking, since there would be no invasive competition. Your daily paper didn't have a list of your interests yet succeeded in making money through advertising. Why can't they now?
1f60c 6y ago
If you want to temporarily enable FLoC for some reason, start Chrome with the following flags (from [0]): --enable-blink-features=InterestCohortAPI --enable-features="FederatedLearningOfCohorts:update_interval/10s/minimum_history_domain_size_required/1,FlocIdSortingLshBasedComputation,InterestCohortFeaturePolicy" [0]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/floc/#try-out-floc-as-a-web-developer https://developer.chrome.com/blog/floc/#try-out-floc-as-a-we...
simias 6y ago
That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an unwanted feature. How long until the list of patches to backport for every new version of Chromium becomes so large that they have to pick and choose which one to keep maintaining and which one to give up on? If tomorrow Google decides to push a very deep change to the way, say, extensions are handled that makes them less effective at ad blocking, will Brave accept the burden to suddenly have to maintain a very deep fork of the browser in order to maintain old functionality? I'm effectively FUDing right now, but my concern is genuine. I'm very perplex that you can make an effectively anti-ad, pro-privacy browser based on the source code of one of the biggest ad companies in the world.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sounds 6y ago
  Fortunately, removing a feature and removing code is pretty easy. It's when a feature is added that it requires much more thought and effort. It's not zero effort, but pretty easy.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  My guess is they run the cost benefit analysis with every Chrome release. Then just give up and accept the change unless it's obviously low cost or in an area they've already forked.
- miedpo 6y ago
  From what I'm remembering, Eich said that once they got big enough, they'd be willing to fork a browser if necessary. I wouldn't put that past Brave considering how many changes it's had (used to be on a different browser engine, also used to use Electron). They'll probably have to grow a bit before this happens though.
lucasyvas 6y ago
Seeing: document.interestCohort is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway. Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.
  - butt_hugger 6y ago
    I mean, I don't think anyone would mind that. Or advertisers for that matter.
  - mikl 6y ago
    > killing advertising itself We had advertising before invasive tracking. The ad business can survive without tracking, they just don’t want to.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    killing targeted, obnoxious ads
    - bagacrap 6y ago
      all obnoxious ads are bad, but I tend to find the less targeted ones, for example the ones for payday loans or ambulance chasers, more obnoxious than products based on my hobbies.
  - hackerfromthefu 6y ago
    >> Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. You misunderstand - Google is in the business of compromising your privacy. They have lots of teams of lots of very smart people figuring out how to compromise your privacy. Further, they are in the real world business of doing it. They are not naïve as your comment was - they find the balance of how far they can push it, by a combination of monopoly power, and also cunning politics, PR and posturing - they are fighting tooth and nail and using every tactic and trick in the business, with an unlimited budget - specifically to compromise your privacy for their financial and political power gain. Any area where they 'seemingly' back away from compromising your privacy, is where they have done extensive cost benefit analysis, and come up with alternative trickier or less understood ways to get what they want but that is more politically acceptable. This is the underlaying reality - the rest of the details of FLoC etc is an information battleground where you as a user are fighting unlimited budget teams that are highly motivated to exploit your privacy. Advertising is in fact just one slice of the power they wield by exploiting your privacy along with everyone else on the planet's. If you try to look at just FLoC in isolation you will miss the forest for the trees, as the results of FLoC are correlated with many other sources of information. FLoC's motivations are some balance of: - reducing PR fallout due to increasing awareness of their exploitation of everyone's privacy - keeping full access to information they already extract from you and everyone else, and in fact increasing it as possible - reducing or hindering other parties access to the total information so they gain more relative power The rest my dear chap is details and their teams and teams of analysts working on this have all day every year to outsmart you in the details of how this is implemented.
sergiotapia 6y ago
I will never feel bad about using adblock. The sites can die for all I care, I'll just use something else. Will never tolerate ads, ever.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  What's really telling is how many people and companies think they're entitled to running ads on my computers and phones, as if I'm the one who is doing something wrong by choosing what I see or don't see.
  - yunohn 6y ago
    So the content creators have no right to demand compensation for creating “what you see“?
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      I have no problem paying for content. However, I'm not going to feel guilty for not going to a movie theater early so that I can see all of the trailers and commercials that are shown before the movie I want to see. I'm also not going to feel guilty for fast forwarding through commercials on TV. Content creators are not entitled to decide what ads I choose to see and not see.
      - pabs3 6y ago
        Movies themselves are full of advertising; the protagonist could use Apple products for example.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      They have the right to demand compensation, but the appropriate way to do that is to gatekeep - i.e. don't provide access until the user pays (or promises to pay). When they serve content with ads, they are not demanding anything.
      - 6y ago
Voline 6y ago
Sites that respect user privacy can disable FLoC on the server side. I’ve already done so with the five that I manage. https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/ https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/
gerash 6y ago
I think there should be an option where you either pay for content you consume on the web or targeted (aka efficient) advertising pays for it. All I care about is my PII information not to leak and be accessible to random people. I don't see any other way and I can't see what these people at EFF are arguing for? It's easy to just keep saying no to everything.
rasz 6y ago
Vivaldi: >document.interestCohort() >VM131:1 Uncaught TypeError: document.interestCohort is not a function at <anonymous>:1:10
- A-Train 6y ago
  This doesn't prove anything. FLoC is enabled only in 5% devices in selected countries.
  - rasz 6y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/moaapb/does_vivaldi_have_a_position_on_andor_plans_to/gu2muze/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/moaapb/does... "At Vivaldi, we are committed to protecting our users from online trackers, and we would not want to enable any kind of user behavioural profiling. The FLoC experiment does not work in Vivaldi, because it relies on several hidden preferences being set, and we do not enable these options in Vivaldi. Our future plan is to prevent the Floc component from functioning, no matter which way it is implemented."
quotemstr 6y ago
Disabling FLoC is reactionary, performative, and honestly, counterproductive. Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win." Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!"
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  >Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win." (Actually does nothing or the sort, continues tracking users while making user experience even worse and some crucial Web features unusable for indie devs.) >Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!" (Pushes "ad industry" out of the way and performs its own tracking and ads.)
pgl 6y ago
What's going to happen is that sites will enumerate which FLoC IDs represent which set of interests, and just use send that data off together with whatever unique ID they're already tracking you with. You can do this by just setting up a new profile and visiting various pages, then checking what the FLoC ID is. See here for an example by Jonathan Foote: https://twitter.com/footePGH/status/1380568421490905088 https://twitter.com/footePGH/status/1380568421490905088 It's based on your browsing history, so companies will now be able to get an aggregate of your interests without having to actually track you across other sites.
whoopdedo 6y ago
My questions about FLoC are who controls the definitions of cohorts? Is it possible for someone to take advantage of cohort information in a way which leaves Google completely out of the loop? Do users (and system administrators) have any control over what cohort information is saved or transmitted by the browser? If they do have control over it, is it enforceable? (e.g. The DNT header is useless because services are not compelled to obey the request.)
braney1 6y ago
The ecosystem is broken, add work but many products have marketing costs built into them that are over 30% of what you pay for, in some cases, over 50% of your monthly fees are marketing expenses. In fact, in SaaS software, a world class company spends 33% (3:1 CAC ratio) on sales and marketing. I don’t mind ads or even having embedded marketing costs in the products I buy, what frustrates me is how long and hard I have to work in addition to all of the waste on marketing to find what a product does, what it costs, what it’s strengths and weaknesses are. And google does nothing to help. I get millions of pages to read, thousands of reviews (many of them fake) and at the end of the day, everyone of us has to waste our time figuring these things out. Go shop for auto insurance or a mortgage or a new piece of software or anything that costs over $1000 annually and you will see what I am talking about.
- hackerfromthefu 6y ago
  Yes it's just exploiting both sellers and users. The market power is broken. Google needs to be broken up, and advertising and general web browsing needs to be completely non-identifiable, or our civilisation is heading to a micromanaged dystopia of stalinesque proportions.
dleslie 6y ago
Too many folks commenting here seem to think that FLoC doesn't compromise privacy, when it is yet another bit of differentiation that can be used to fingerprint a browser. It's a particularly granular one, as well, placing users into manageable cohorts of only a few dozen thousands in size, or so is claimed. Combine FLoC with a handful of other fingerprint bits and you can track an individual.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  don't users move between cohorts with some frequency?
- ekimekim 6y ago
  Browser fingerprinting is besides the point here. The whole reason they want to fingerprint you is to build up an advertising profile. FLoC cuts out the middleman by giving every single site you visit access to the proceeds of the cross-site tracking. It's like saying "There's too many cameras pointed at my house, so instead I'm going to start publically streaming my life 24/7".
  - dleslie 6y ago
    There's a third option: we outlaw surveillance, or we smash the cameras.
adamsvystun 6y ago
While FLoC does sound like a bad idea, I think it would be helpful if critistism was coupled with counter proposals. What do the critics see as ideal solution here: making all of the free services paid? having just more content-based ads? or something different?
- btian 6y ago
  Given the context is Brave, their alternative is attention token
- EMM_386 6y ago
  The local pizzeria can say "only show advertisements that want to be shown within 30 miles of Somewhere, NY. The site for expecting mothers can show ads for baby products. Contextual advertising. Flip the entire thing upside down and let the sites declare to the advertisers what niche they fill, and let them get relevant advertisements.
yholio 6y ago
Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and MAC addresses to user agents, referers and canvas leaks? But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.
- codezero 6y ago
  I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google. I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform. The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.
  - travisgriggs 6y ago
    > I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mcny 6y ago
Sorry if this has been asked before but why does google need any of this? Assuming a user is logged into Google, Google already knows a lot about the user. Is this about users who are not logged into google? Is this to share information with vendors such as WPP? What is the point of this?
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  With third party cookies disabled, the Google Ads scripts running on non-Google websites cannot tell you're logged into Google and what's your Google profile. All they know is someone is visiting the site. For them to decide what ads to display, interests have to be gathered through different means. This new FLoC is a way for your browser to let them know what you're interested in.
indymike 6y ago
Good. Brave is a really, really great alternative to Chrome. I started using it about a year ago, and it is pretty much Chrome, with less ads and spyware in it. Great software.
anonwebguy 6y ago
I'm going to be that guy tonight. I never post online. I don't see value in posting online. But I feel as if I have to weight in on this conversation. I run an online business. I depend on ads. I hate being tracked. Here's the deal, Google is tracking you no matter what. Even if they aren't using your information for advertising, you still feed them all the best first party data in the world. You give them your search queries, emails, your phone location etc.. Your information is valuable. Even if you block online advertising, you are still going to be targeted in the real world the same way. Facebook, yes they are shitty too, but again, they are fed all this information. Now, their information is 3rd party. They get pixel fires about you that allow them to coorelate data about you, but it isn't first part exactly. In the advertising world you target the person or you target on page. The issue with on page is there just isn't enough content about a subject to target and frankly, just beacuse you read something, doesn't mean you are interested in buying it. I don't care if it's a cookie, or FLoC, or what ever, people are going to be monitored, it's too large of a business. As an individual if you are afraid of it, you have the choice to use Brave or what ever. But at large scale, most people don't care. I believe that this tracking rhetoric is dangerous. At least we are having the conversation about tracking and allowing the people who don't want to be tracked to avoid it. If it were the inverse, these things would still happen behind closed doors, because it's extremely profitable. Governements have been tracking people forever. Some choose to do evil, populations revolt. People can always beat governments. Yes I am bias becuase my business does depend on paid advertising like many others. I understand the "big brother" effect. But I also know that other agencies (NSA/CIA) are already doing these things and are either forcing the tech companies to collect the data and share it or are willing to do it. The fact that we all focus on private companies being the crux of the problem and aren't focus on the 3 letter agencies. Either way, we live in new uncertain times and the US economy has always been about consumerism. These ads have generated incredible amounts of wealth for indvidiaul companies and the tech companies. I do agree that Google makes too much money. As an advertiser, I know that their algorithm is essentially a black box and as an advertiser we are getting fucked. We have no real transparency that our bids are true. We are hoping to hit a CPA and just keep to it. I can tell you that in the last 2 years, online advertising performance has dropped a lot. It's a combination of people having less money and our economy doing worse and there's a lot more competition. I suspect that these companies are inflating their bids artificially. We know that Facebook penalizes people it doesn't like but provides absolute no transparency on the system. These penalties also cost you more money - which is bullshit. All of these companies have no support to contact and you are at the beck and whim of a 3rd world outsourced tech support agent that can't do anything. To summerize. I agree tracking is bad. But you offer all of your data up every time you use email or a search engine. It's all collected and there is no better alterantive. At least these companies are providing a service for businesses to thrive. I think they make wayyyyy too much money. If you think disabling FLoC is going to stop anyting, you havn't looked at the big picture. If people want to stop being tracked, get off the internet, don't use a search engine, don't use email. But that isn't practical. If you think any of these "Privacy Safe" companeis are doing anything other than just charging you and still handing your data over to what ever 3 letter agency requests it under an NSL, you're crazy.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
How this is actually going to go -- people will find out in x months/years that it's fairly easy to create a cohort of 1, if you do enough filtering. The only issue is that now it's ostensibly outside of the scope of GDPR. It's already happened with facebook targeting[0], imagine how much more specific the information at Google is. [0]: https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebook-how-to-target-one-specific-person-with-super-targeted-ads-515ba6e068f6 https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...
NiekvdMaas 6y ago
It's possible to disable the field trial in regular Chrome too: --disable-blink-features=InterestCohortAPI,InterestCohortFeaturePolicy
sunsipples 6y ago
can we just go back to the days of bonzibuddy and be happy with the internet?
xg15 6y ago
Context: Chrome is doing an origin trial on FLOC since march 30: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox/floc https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-pr... To my knowledge, it's not yet available as a public web API.
cybert00th 6y ago
Wow, that was...brave...
BrendanEich 6y ago
Blog post today from us on this topic: https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/ https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/

378 points by brunoluiz 6y ago

riq_ 6y ago

care to explain what is Brave and what is FLoC?

geofft 6y ago
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) : > Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators along with the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they earned. Quoting https://amifloced.org/ https://amifloced.org/ : > Third-party cookies are the technology that powers much of the surveillance-advertising business today. But cookies are on their way out, and Google is trying to design a way for advertisers to keep targeting users based on their web browsing once cookies are gone. It's come up with FLoC. > FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web.
mcrittenden 6y ago
Brave [0] is a web browser, built from Chromium, but with built in ad and tracker blocking. FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. The third party cookie is dying, and FLoC is a way for companies to group people together and track them, rather than tracking individuals. Here's more info about that [1] and here's an EFF article about why it's dangerous [2]. [0] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
deleted 6y ago
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morelisp 6y ago
FLoC is a way to make Google's ad network's targeting worth comparatively more than other ad networks'. Brave is an other ad network.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Can you expand on how Brave is an ad network?
  - morelisp 6y ago
    https://brave.com/brave-ads/ https://brave.com/brave-ads/ Company Overview & Core Offering Brave is the first global digital ad platform built for privacy, offering advertisers the opportunity to participate in a premium, brand safe, and opt-in ad ecosystem, designed for a future without 3rd party cookies.
_eLRIC 6y ago
Brave claims to be a privacy oriented web browser. It is apparently based on Chromium and someone identified a Chromium feature that was phoning home (I.e. Google servers) with some informations reducing user anonimity (At least that's what I understood from a quick look)

rq1 6y ago

For those who like me wonder what is FLoC : https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc

mcint 6y ago

FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts which aims to target advertising better without it directly relying on singularly personal information. https://web.dev/floc/ https://web.dev/floc/ FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox/floc https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

londons_explore 6y ago
If I must have ads, I'd prefer not be tracked by hundreds of untrustworthy companies, and I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads... This therefore seems like the best bad option...
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    I'd also like to support websites I visit, though, if I don't have the money to directly donate to them and if I am going to purchase a product anyways (think visiting an amazon product page, leaving it for a day, then clicking an ad for it to give x% to the website). Many websites today wouldn't exist without ads since a lot of their traffic is people who don't go out of their way to donate to websites they find useful. If I can do this without giving up privacy I'll turn off my ad blocker (and I already do for websites I find useful).
    - jeffgreco 6y ago

amboo7 6y ago

Brave is a web browser, and I found this in the code: federated_learning::kFederatedLearningOfCohorts, I suppose that's what FLoC stands for.

dataflow 6y ago

Is there any evidence behind the idea that FLoC is more privacy-preserving than third-party cookies? Intuitively that is not obvious to me at all, especially given there are so many other fingerprinting techniques it could be combined with.

dialtone 6y ago
You can't use FLoC ID for fingerprinting, it changes continuously.
- dataflow 6y ago
  Interesting, didn't know that. In that case then how does it identify a cohort in a useful manner? Surely websites will need to temporally tie together the values to be able to target ads?
  - dialtone 6y ago
    The cohort semantic meaning is stable, although not disclosed an ML system would learn its correlation to a given goal. Cohort membership changes pretty frequently instead. So the system may put all people that browse mostly golf sites together in cohort 12345 that only the algorithm knows it's about golf sites, people enter and leave that cohort on a daily basis and you can only be a member of a single cohort at a time.
    - dataflow 6y ago
      Why would the cohort membership change frequently? Isn't it based on your browsing habits? I don't think my habits change frequently—do most people's? Also, even if I take for granted that everyone's cohort changes daily, how does that imply anonymity? Like say my habit is that I check emails a ton on Monday, go on YouTube on Saturday, read the news on Sunday, etc... so my habits are changing daily, okay, but not weekly, right? Or maybe I do them in a different order on another week, but I'm not going to develop 1000 different habits across 1000 days, right? Shouldn't some kind of frequency analysis provide fairly consistent results?

mistrial9 6y ago

FLoC is new to me .. a quick check Chrome Browser on a chrome-book shows Federated Learning of Cohorts - Version: 1.0.6 Chrome : 89.0.4389.116 (Official Build) (64-bit)

mikl 6y ago

Good to see Brave sticking to their privacy guns. FLoC is a brazen attempt for Big Ad (aka. Google and its ilk) to keep their spying-on-users gravy train going, now that GDPR and similar laws are making their old methods illegal (without consent). No one wants to consent to being spied on, so FLoC is circumnavigating the GDPR consent requirements, letting them spy on all Chrome-users without consent.

Daho0n 6y ago
Only in a world of Google dominance could Brave be seen as the good guy.
judge2020 6y ago
Except with FLOC you can watch your network connection in/out and see that, instead of a persistent identifier being used to track you, you only send your interest categories. FLOC's intent is to keep their money making operation afloat, but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users.
- xvector 6y ago
  > but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users. Your FLOC cohort is a summary of your web browsing activity. FLOC doesn't solve the privacy problems that trackers create - it just hands them your browsing history on a silver platter.
  - yunohn 6y ago
    It’s literally a cohort ID? Where did you get “hands them your browsing history on a silver platter” from?
    - type0 6y ago
      because combined with browser fingerprinting it is exactly the outcome

phnofive 6y ago

The recursive irony here is that Alphabet implemented FLoC to put a moat around tracking adtech, and Brave consumes Chromium for its own means of generating revenue from vending a browser (BAT), so of course there’s no reason to propagate FLoC.

varispeed 6y ago
I don't understand why tracking is not being considered as mechanism helping companies to manipulate consumers into buying their stuff, essentially amounting to fraud? If you were going to track someone in real life and manipulating them into buying something, you would certainly end up in jail, so why is this allowed over the internet? Because consumers don't see companies who stalk them? In my opinion the whole tracking business should be illegal.
- comboy 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_location_analytics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_location_analytics
- kelnos 6y ago
  Isn't advertising, by definition, manipulating customers into buying stuff?
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Advertising is providing information about the product, so that consumer can make an informed decision whether to buy it or not. Creating messaging tailored specifically to an individual exploiting various vulnerabilities or their situation is not.

kamaitachi 6y ago

Bad Voltage did a good show recently dedicated to FLoC. https://www.badvoltage.org/2021/04/01/3x26/ https://www.badvoltage.org/2021/04/01/3x26/

Ygg2 6y ago

I wonder how long, before Google sabotages Chromium to hurt Brave and other downwards forks?

Daho0n 6y ago
>Brave ..... downwards forks Very fitting.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Would downstream forks work better as a word there?

fsflover 6y ago

Check whether your Chrome is FLoCed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755313.

gerash 6y ago

What is wrong with FloC and what's a better alternative?

bww 6y ago
Your question assumes that transparent, behavior-based, cross-site user interest tracking is somehow essential functionality for the web and we just have to find the right way to do it. I think most people who are criticizing FLoC would challenge the idea that this class of functionality needs to or should exist at all.
- gerash 6y ago
  Content creators want to get paid as much as anyone else and it's either through direct payment by the consumers or by embedding advertisement in their content. All this FloC, third party cookies, etc. are efforts to make that advertisement route more efficient. So my question is what are the critics proposing instead? Get rid of ads and just ask the audience to pay per view or make everything a subscription? Not paying content creators (ad blocking) is certainly not a sustainable alternative.
  - hackerfromthefu 6y ago
    Simple advertisements like billboards. One image, no stalker tracking, no global user profiles, no malware, and no animation or movement. Advertising was effective as an image or text that shows the reader a value proposition. What we have these days is stalkers and information rapists pretending to be advertisers.
  - totony 6y ago
    The reason non-tracking ads pay less is that tracking ads are now the norm. If standards/laws were implemented to protect privacy and block such tracking, content providers (if they are so inclined) would make as much money with non-tracking ads as they do now with tracking, since there would be no invasive competition. Your daily paper didn't have a list of your interests yet succeeded in making money through advertising. Why can't they now?

1f60c 6y ago

If you want to temporarily enable FLoC for some reason, start Chrome with the following flags (from [0]): --enable-blink-features=InterestCohortAPI --enable-features="FederatedLearningOfCohorts:update_interval/10s/minimum_history_domain_size_required/1,FlocIdSortingLshBasedComputation,InterestCohortFeaturePolicy" [0]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/floc/#try-out-floc-as-a-web-developer https://developer.chrome.com/blog/floc/#try-out-floc-as-a-we...

simias 6y ago

That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version. That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an unwanted feature. How long until the list of patches to backport for every new version of Chromium becomes so large that they have to pick and choose which one to keep maintaining and which one to give up on? If tomorrow Google decides to push a very deep change to the way, say, extensions are handled that makes them less effective at ad blocking, will Brave accept the burden to suddenly have to maintain a very deep fork of the browser in order to maintain old functionality? I'm effectively FUDing right now, but my concern is genuine. I'm very perplex that you can make an effectively anti-ad, pro-privacy browser based on the source code of one of the biggest ad companies in the world.

deleted 6y ago
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sounds 6y ago
Fortunately, removing a feature and removing code is pretty easy. It's when a feature is added that it requires much more thought and effort. It's not zero effort, but pretty easy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
paulryanrogers 6y ago
My guess is they run the cost benefit analysis with every Chrome release. Then just give up and accept the change unless it's obviously low cost or in an area they've already forked.
miedpo 6y ago
From what I'm remembering, Eich said that once they got big enough, they'd be willing to fork a browser if necessary. I wouldn't put that past Brave considering how many changes it's had (used to be on a different browser engine, also used to use Electron). They'll probably have to grow a bit before this happens though.

lucasyvas 6y ago

Seeing: document.interestCohort is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.

quotemstr 6y ago
Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway. Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.
- butt_hugger 6y ago
  I mean, I don't think anyone would mind that. Or advertisers for that matter.
- mikl 6y ago
  > killing advertising itself We had advertising before invasive tracking. The ad business can survive without tracking, they just don’t want to.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  killing targeted, obnoxious ads
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    all obnoxious ads are bad, but I tend to find the less targeted ones, for example the ones for payday loans or ambulance chasers, more obnoxious than products based on my hobbies.
- hackerfromthefu 6y ago
  >> Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. You misunderstand - Google is in the business of compromising your privacy. They have lots of teams of lots of very smart people figuring out how to compromise your privacy. Further, they are in the real world business of doing it. They are not naïve as your comment was - they find the balance of how far they can push it, by a combination of monopoly power, and also cunning politics, PR and posturing - they are fighting tooth and nail and using every tactic and trick in the business, with an unlimited budget - specifically to compromise your privacy for their financial and political power gain. Any area where they 'seemingly' back away from compromising your privacy, is where they have done extensive cost benefit analysis, and come up with alternative trickier or less understood ways to get what they want but that is more politically acceptable. This is the underlaying reality - the rest of the details of FLoC etc is an information battleground where you as a user are fighting unlimited budget teams that are highly motivated to exploit your privacy. Advertising is in fact just one slice of the power they wield by exploiting your privacy along with everyone else on the planet's. If you try to look at just FLoC in isolation you will miss the forest for the trees, as the results of FLoC are correlated with many other sources of information. FLoC's motivations are some balance of: - reducing PR fallout due to increasing awareness of their exploitation of everyone's privacy - keeping full access to information they already extract from you and everyone else, and in fact increasing it as possible - reducing or hindering other parties access to the total information so they gain more relative power The rest my dear chap is details and their teams and teams of analysts working on this have all day every year to outsmart you in the details of how this is implemented.

sergiotapia 6y ago

I will never feel bad about using adblock. The sites can die for all I care, I'll just use something else. Will never tolerate ads, ever.

heavyset_go 6y ago
What's really telling is how many people and companies think they're entitled to running ads on my computers and phones, as if I'm the one who is doing something wrong by choosing what I see or don't see.
- yunohn 6y ago
  So the content creators have no right to demand compensation for creating “what you see“?
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    I have no problem paying for content. However, I'm not going to feel guilty for not going to a movie theater early so that I can see all of the trailers and commercials that are shown before the movie I want to see. I'm also not going to feel guilty for fast forwarding through commercials on TV. Content creators are not entitled to decide what ads I choose to see and not see.
    - pabs3 6y ago
      Movies themselves are full of advertising; the protagonist could use Apple products for example.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    They have the right to demand compensation, but the appropriate way to do that is to gatekeep - i.e. don't provide access until the user pays (or promises to pay). When they serve content with ads, they are not demanding anything.
    - 6y ago

Voline 6y ago

Sites that respect user privacy can disable FLoC on the server side. I’ve already done so with the five that I manage. https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/ https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/

gerash 6y ago

I think there should be an option where you either pay for content you consume on the web or targeted (aka efficient) advertising pays for it. All I care about is my PII information not to leak and be accessible to random people. I don't see any other way and I can't see what these people at EFF are arguing for? It's easy to just keep saying no to everything.

rasz 6y ago

Vivaldi: >document.interestCohort() >VM131:1 Uncaught TypeError: document.interestCohort is not a function at <anonymous>:1:10

A-Train 6y ago
This doesn't prove anything. FLoC is enabled only in 5% devices in selected countries.
- rasz 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/moaapb/does_vivaldi_have_a_position_on_andor_plans_to/gu2muze/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/moaapb/does... "At Vivaldi, we are committed to protecting our users from online trackers, and we would not want to enable any kind of user behavioural profiling. The FLoC experiment does not work in Vivaldi, because it relies on several hidden preferences being set, and we do not enable these options in Vivaldi. Our future plan is to prevent the Floc component from functioning, no matter which way it is implemented."

quotemstr 6y ago

Disabling FLoC is reactionary, performative, and honestly, counterproductive. Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win." Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!"

forgotmypw17 6y ago
>Ad industry: "Look. We listened to your concerns about ad privacy. Here's a solution that gives you everything you want. Now we can serve interest-based ads without tracking you across the internet. You win." (Actually does nothing or the sort, continues tracking users while making user experience even worse and some crucial Web features unusable for indie devs.) >Brave: "We don't want a solution. We want to be sanctimonious and angry!" (Pushes "ad industry" out of the way and performs its own tracking and ads.)

pgl 6y ago

What's going to happen is that sites will enumerate which FLoC IDs represent which set of interests, and just use send that data off together with whatever unique ID they're already tracking you with. You can do this by just setting up a new profile and visiting various pages, then checking what the FLoC ID is. See here for an example by Jonathan Foote: https://twitter.com/footePGH/status/1380568421490905088 https://twitter.com/footePGH/status/1380568421490905088 It's based on your browsing history, so companies will now be able to get an aggregate of your interests without having to actually track you across other sites.

whoopdedo 6y ago

My questions about FLoC are who controls the definitions of cohorts? Is it possible for someone to take advantage of cohort information in a way which leaves Google completely out of the loop? Do users (and system administrators) have any control over what cohort information is saved or transmitted by the browser? If they do have control over it, is it enforceable? (e.g. The DNT header is useless because services are not compelled to obey the request.)

braney1 6y ago

The ecosystem is broken, add work but many products have marketing costs built into them that are over 30% of what you pay for, in some cases, over 50% of your monthly fees are marketing expenses. In fact, in SaaS software, a world class company spends 33% (3:1 CAC ratio) on sales and marketing. I don’t mind ads or even having embedded marketing costs in the products I buy, what frustrates me is how long and hard I have to work in addition to all of the waste on marketing to find what a product does, what it costs, what it’s strengths and weaknesses are. And google does nothing to help. I get millions of pages to read, thousands of reviews (many of them fake) and at the end of the day, everyone of us has to waste our time figuring these things out. Go shop for auto insurance or a mortgage or a new piece of software or anything that costs over $1000 annually and you will see what I am talking about.

hackerfromthefu 6y ago
Yes it's just exploiting both sellers and users. The market power is broken. Google needs to be broken up, and advertising and general web browsing needs to be completely non-identifiable, or our civilisation is heading to a micromanaged dystopia of stalinesque proportions.

dleslie 6y ago

Too many folks commenting here seem to think that FLoC doesn't compromise privacy, when it is yet another bit of differentiation that can be used to fingerprint a browser. It's a particularly granular one, as well, placing users into manageable cohorts of only a few dozen thousands in size, or so is claimed. Combine FLoC with a handful of other fingerprint bits and you can track an individual.

bagacrap 6y ago
don't users move between cohorts with some frequency?
ekimekim 6y ago
Browser fingerprinting is besides the point here. The whole reason they want to fingerprint you is to build up an advertising profile. FLoC cuts out the middleman by giving every single site you visit access to the proceeds of the cross-site tracking. It's like saying "There's too many cameras pointed at my house, so instead I'm going to start publically streaming my life 24/7".
- dleslie 6y ago
  There's a third option: we outlaw surveillance, or we smash the cameras.

adamsvystun 6y ago

While FLoC does sound like a bad idea, I think it would be helpful if critistism was coupled with counter proposals. What do the critics see as ideal solution here: making all of the free services paid? having just more content-based ads? or something different?

btian 6y ago
Given the context is Brave, their alternative is attention token
EMM_386 6y ago
The local pizzeria can say "only show advertisements that want to be shown within 30 miles of Somewhere, NY. The site for expecting mothers can show ads for baby products. Contextual advertising. Flip the entire thing upside down and let the sites declare to the advertisers what niche they fill, and let them get relevant advertisements.

yholio 6y ago

Instead of more palatable user tracking, how about we tell advertisers and internet companies: fuck off, we don't want any tracking? How about we hunt down and eliminate all features that allow cross-site information sharing? How about we treat attacks on user privacy as security problems of the web standards, à la Tor, and build technology that aggressively hides any user signature in any layer, from rotating IP and MAC addresses to user agents, referers and canvas leaks? But wait you say, how would the very useful internet ecosystem survive without advertising revenue? Well, there is nothing wrong with advertising per se, it's a natural part of a free market economy. It's ok to target ads to the user's search terms or social feed. The problem is that, in the pursuit of advertising revenue, a cutthroat economic competition pushed advertisers to mine more and more personal data simply to stay competitive. It's a low sum game: it doesn't bring much more money in advertising or make the internet significantly more useful, but it destroys the privacy of everyone. A spectacular market failure ripe for correction.

codezero 6y ago
I wrote a long, but low effort comment where my thesis was that I think it’s ok for companies to pay for your attention, but the problem is that they are paying Google. I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. USPS becomes vehicle for junk mail Telco becomes vehicle for robocalls Television a ratio of value to ads that gets smaller and smaller Internet becomes vehicle for ad revenue All of these things are companies abusing communication platforms for your attention and we seemingly are never willing to pay more than advertisers are, maybe because by the time that decision happens folks move to the next platform. The meta thing is that the Internet is a meta platform and we can keep making new communication methods, but we are still stuck with Google.
- travisgriggs 6y ago
  > I ended up reaching the conclusion that we should ban paying money for your attention, but I haven’t thought of better alternatives for businesses to grow or expand online yet. I think western society struggles with banning things. But we've shown an aptitude for taxing vices. It's all about the money, right? Rather than banning, would taxing this economy achieve a compromised version of what you're seeking?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mcny 6y ago

Sorry if this has been asked before but why does google need any of this? Assuming a user is logged into Google, Google already knows a lot about the user. Is this about users who are not logged into google? Is this to share information with vendors such as WPP? What is the point of this?

noisem4ker 6y ago
With third party cookies disabled, the Google Ads scripts running on non-Google websites cannot tell you're logged into Google and what's your Google profile. All they know is someone is visiting the site. For them to decide what ads to display, interests have to be gathered through different means. This new FLoC is a way for your browser to let them know what you're interested in.

indymike 6y ago

Good. Brave is a really, really great alternative to Chrome. I started using it about a year ago, and it is pretty much Chrome, with less ads and spyware in it. Great software.

anonwebguy 6y ago

I'm going to be that guy tonight. I never post online. I don't see value in posting online. But I feel as if I have to weight in on this conversation. I run an online business. I depend on ads. I hate being tracked. Here's the deal, Google is tracking you no matter what. Even if they aren't using your information for advertising, you still feed them all the best first party data in the world. You give them your search queries, emails, your phone location etc.. Your information is valuable. Even if you block online advertising, you are still going to be targeted in the real world the same way. Facebook, yes they are shitty too, but again, they are fed all this information. Now, their information is 3rd party. They get pixel fires about you that allow them to coorelate data about you, but it isn't first part exactly. In the advertising world you target the person or you target on page. The issue with on page is there just isn't enough content about a subject to target and frankly, just beacuse you read something, doesn't mean you are interested in buying it. I don't care if it's a cookie, or FLoC, or what ever, people are going to be monitored, it's too large of a business. As an individual if you are afraid of it, you have the choice to use Brave or what ever. But at large scale, most people don't care. I believe that this tracking rhetoric is dangerous. At least we are having the conversation about tracking and allowing the people who don't want to be tracked to avoid it. If it were the inverse, these things would still happen behind closed doors, because it's extremely profitable. Governements have been tracking people forever. Some choose to do evil, populations revolt. People can always beat governments. Yes I am bias becuase my business does depend on paid advertising like many others. I understand the "big brother" effect. But I also know that other agencies (NSA/CIA) are already doing these things and are either forcing the tech companies to collect the data and share it or are willing to do it. The fact that we all focus on private companies being the crux of the problem and aren't focus on the 3 letter agencies. Either way, we live in new uncertain times and the US economy has always been about consumerism. These ads have generated incredible amounts of wealth for indvidiaul companies and the tech companies. I do agree that Google makes too much money. As an advertiser, I know that their algorithm is essentially a black box and as an advertiser we are getting fucked. We have no real transparency that our bids are true. We are hoping to hit a CPA and just keep to it. I can tell you that in the last 2 years, online advertising performance has dropped a lot. It's a combination of people having less money and our economy doing worse and there's a lot more competition. I suspect that these companies are inflating their bids artificially. We know that Facebook penalizes people it doesn't like but provides absolute no transparency on the system. These penalties also cost you more money - which is bullshit. All of these companies have no support to contact and you are at the beck and whim of a 3rd world outsourced tech support agent that can't do anything. To summerize. I agree tracking is bad. But you offer all of your data up every time you use email or a search engine. It's all collected and there is no better alterantive. At least these companies are providing a service for businesses to thrive. I think they make wayyyyy too much money. If you think disabling FLoC is going to stop anyting, you havn't looked at the big picture. If people want to stop being tracked, get off the internet, don't use a search engine, don't use email. But that isn't practical. If you think any of these "Privacy Safe" companeis are doing anything other than just charging you and still handing your data over to what ever 3 letter agency requests it under an NSL, you're crazy.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

How this is actually going to go -- people will find out in x months/years that it's fairly easy to create a cohort of 1, if you do enough filtering. The only issue is that now it's ostensibly outside of the scope of GDPR. It's already happened with facebook targeting[0], imagine how much more specific the information at Google is. [0]: https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebook-how-to-target-one-specific-person-with-super-targeted-ads-515ba6e068f6 https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...

NiekvdMaas 6y ago

It's possible to disable the field trial in regular Chrome too: --disable-blink-features=InterestCohortAPI,InterestCohortFeaturePolicy

sunsipples 6y ago

can we just go back to the days of bonzibuddy and be happy with the internet?

xg15 6y ago

Context: Chrome is doing an origin trial on FLOC since march 30: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox/floc https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-pr... To my knowledge, it's not yet available as a public web API.

cybert00th 6y ago

Wow, that was...brave...

BrendanEich 6y ago

Blog post today from us on this topic: https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/ https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/