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FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts which aims to target advertising better without it directly relying on singularly personal information. https://w

• 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
        Why are you spending time on websites you don’t find useful?
        • ChefboyOG 6y ago
          Because when you visit a new site, you don't know ahead of time if it is useful or not. That's just how "new" works.
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      Using an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
      • goalieca 6y ago
        It’s been said many times, but if the business model is advertising then you’re the product.. not the quality journalism or content. They’ll focus on generating content to increase engagement instead of perfecting what you think it is they are supposed to deliver. Perhaps it is time for an advertising model to die out as the default.
        • cortesoft 6y ago
          Ok, then don’t patronize sites supported by ads.
          • Nursie 6y ago
            This is why I’m more than happy when sites say “adblocker detected, please disable or leave”. I will not render your ads. I’d be happy to put that in the first http request to your site. If that means no site for me, then quite honestly 90% of my browsing is a waste of time anyway.
      • simias 6y ago
        Or they'll move on to a more sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling their user's privacy?
        • jshen 6y ago
          A business model that will exclude the poor.
          • jay_kyburz 6y ago
            Lets not pretend that ads help people with less money. Ads are designed to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. They encourage people to believe their self worth is linked to the things they own. That a persons status in society is somehow associated with how much money they have to spend.
    • HeckFeck 6y ago
      Preach. I don't consent to tracking. I don't want my browser helping anyone track me in any way. I don't want to be pressured and manipulated into buying things I don't need. Advertising is not moral and I owe nothing to anyone who tries to manipulate me. Websites can move to more efficient and lighter methods of delivery to cover the absence of advertising revenue. Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. Everyone wins.
      • somethingAlex 6y ago
        What do you mean by "more efficient and lighter methods of delivery?"
        • HeckFeck 6y ago
          Plainer HTML and very little Javascript which will reduce development and running costs. As witness, this very website. It supplies all that is necessary and no more. It is very successful. With harmful incentives removed, this would encourage websites to focus on good writing and less on being 'content farms' to drive up engagement for the advertisers. All I want from most sites is the text. Not adverts, trackers and those damnable autoplaying videos that jump out and follow me down the page. I use the reader mode in most cases. Why is it necessary to use reader mode if not to cut the useless cruft? Why can't the web just be like that?
      • calvinmorrison 6y ago
        Most cost is producing content, not hosting.
      • throwaway3699 6y ago
        > Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. I don't want to be rude, but won't they just end up losing their livelihoods? If the advertising industry goes, most programmers will see their salaries drop hugely. Even those not working in advertising will see a drop due to the flood of supply.
    • dathinab 6y ago
      Honestly I have no problems with ad's as long as it doesn't involve any tracking (or lets call it what it is spying). If blog or similar can finance part of their cost with Ad's, why not. Sure on slow internet it's a somewhat different matter. Anyway Ad's okay, but tracking for me is spying and should be treated like that, i.e. it should be illegal. There are ways to have personalized ads without it, like local learning which then selects to get an add for a specific topic, with that a side could still track which ads you got, but it would be much less useful as FLoC, and then you add additional steps to even further decrees any chance of tracking. Companies still get implicit feedback by what adds get selected more then others. People can explicitly blacklist annoying (or offensive) adds making sure they don't see them ever again and if enough do so in turn making that app not seen much more at all etc. etc. But the FLoC cohorts are WAY to small/identifiying to not allow you to be tracked fairly easy with it. Just combine it with other identifying aspects of browsers (there are a lot) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's often allows a 100% unique identification. And given that you likely wont be able to "ad-block" FLoC this makes it way worse then the status quo.
      • Ntrails 6y ago
        If you could give me a world in which ads were always static images with a link behind them and nothing more. Where they never move, never pop, never animate, never play sounds or video, never run scripts etc etc... Yeah, in that world, ads would be ok with me. Sure they're pointless because I won't click on them - but not really worse than having a blank spot in the page because of an ad blocker.
      • tremon 6y ago
        Honestly I have no problems with ad's While I have no problem with the concept itself of advertising, I do have a problem with modern implementations of ads. Almost invariably, they are loud (vocally and visually), intrusive, obnoxious and almost coercive in their use of language. They are intended to dumb down the target audience, rather than enrich their targets' lives. I do have a problem with everything that attacks my ability to think freely.
        • admax88q 6y ago
  • prepend 6y ago
    I see irrelevant ads anyway. I’d rather block all this and use Brave and/or an ad blocker. A choice of least worst is not necessary.
    • tssva 6y ago
      Brave is a protection racket, crypto scam, privacy violating always with an excuse after company. Why the hell would I trust them?
      • chrisco255 6y ago
        Brave is a free open source product that you don't have to pay for or use. It's a browser with an integrated ad blocker. I opted into Brave, no one forced me to. I asserted my right as a user to run software on my machine how I see fit when I browse the web. The ad model of the web is exploitative, monopolistic, privacy invasive, abusive to everyone, and makes the whole open web ecosystem bow down to the whims of Facebook and Google.
        • tssva 6y ago
          I have opted into using Chrome, no one forced me to. I have asserted my right as a user to run software on my machine how I see fit when I browse the web. The ad model of the web allows me to freely browse the web while providing a source of income to those who work hard to provide the services and information I seek on the web.
          • prepend 6y ago
            > who work hard You have no idea how hard people work. Ad browsing pays the same no matter how hard people are working.
      • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
        Sources? That just seems like hyperbole actually, and from a biased opinion or vested interest. Brave seems to handle privacy very well considering the choices available, and has made a number of good privacy decisions from what I can see after watching browsers evolve for 25 years. I have switched to using Brave and installing it for those I support. The crypto thing is 1) easy to turn off, 2) an attempt at a possibly better business model where users aren't just sold with it. Regardless I simply turn the crypto setting off.
  • foobiter 6y ago
    the option to be tracked by one untrustworthy company? oh and they’re also in charge of the “anonymization” algorithm, oh and they also decide who is exempt due to protected status (race, income, etc), did I also mention they make the browser most people use and are one of the world’s largest advertising providers? where is the better part? is it the fact that this makes fingerprinting easier? or that floc makes more data available to advertisers than cookies?
  • dathinab 6y ago
    It's not because the way it's made it makes it easier for hundreds of untrustworthy companies to track you... It says it's about respecting the privacy of users better but in practice it fails very bad at doing so the only thing it archives is allowing Google to disable cookie based tracking and with that makes it harder for 3rd party trackers to be google independent (it not harder for 3rd party trackers if they use/abuse the FLoC Id and generay there are many ways to track users which are not cookie based so especially when it comes to the very bad offender of invasive tracking it doesn't make a difference or becomes even easier, but some of the smaller google ad (and analytic) alternatives will have it harder).
  • Vinnl 6y ago
    > I'd also prefer not see irrelevant ads. This sounded good when I first heard it, but by now I understand 'relevant' to mean 'tailored to optimally influence my behaviour', eg showing me articles about the futility of voting if my political preferences are likely to lean a particular way.
  • matkoniecz 6y ago
    I strictly prefer irrelevant ads less likely to influence me. I really have enough projects, TODO lists, interesting things to buy to last for lifetime of 250 years. Why I would want ads likely to influence me? There is basically no chance that ad will show me useful, worth using object or service to buy that I would not discover anyway. It would be just another scam more effectively targeting me.
    • avree 6y ago
      There are plenty of good products that only get discovered because of advertisement. People aren’t constantly searching for every single one of their pain points at once. One day, you may have a need for a product, and someone who previously solved your need can’t afford to make the product anymore because only a small percentage of people realized it was a solved problem.
    • petters 6y ago
      This has not been true for me. I have discovered interesting things in Facebook ads that I would not have discovered and bought otherwise. (They were obscure Kickstarter projects)
      • matkoniecz 6y ago
        I agree that there is some chance that some products will be genuinely useful. But overall risk of getting persuaded to buy worthless products or scammy "investments" seems to not be worth discovering real gems. Overall I would prefer both scams and genuine offers to be as far as away from my interests as possible. Obviously, I would prefer actually useful offers to be close to my interests and to have no scams/worthless trash/malware/porno in my ads, but it appears to not be an available option.
      • rainforest 6y ago
        Most Kickstarter campaigns I get shown on FB are from third party services that just upload the Kickstarter breach list (my email is in it). Could that have happened to you?
      • 6y ago
  • throwawayboise 6y ago
    If ads are relevant to the content of the current page, no user profiling (even pseudo-anonymously) is necessary. To me that would be the best option.
    • lupire 6y ago
      Not every web page has an associated strong commercial intent. Most sites, quality sites, would lose out to commerical junk sites if only commercial sites could make money from ads.
      • TheSmiddy 6y ago
        Can you think of an example where there isn't an associated industry that would be able to serve ads? A philosophy blog is the first thing that comes to find but even then that can have ads for universities, textbooks, quirky t-shirts, etc.
        • jefftk 6y ago
          While you can often come up with relevant tie-ins for websites (a weather site could sell vacation packages, a news site could sell... insurance?) it turns out that for a huge fraction of websites relevant commercial interest is just very low.
  • natch 6y ago
    I prefer irrelevant ads because I learn about new things outside of my bubble. Who knew that ship designers could buy special plugins for CAD environments? Even though I could have guessed it (In fact, I made this example up), it’s still fun and interesting to be surprised.
  • berryjerry 5y ago
    I don't think there is a time in the last decade where I received a "relevant" ad. The most relevant they have been is spamming adverts for products I already purchased.
• dialtone 6y ago
  It is a very similar feature to Apple Segments[1] already implemented in iOS on which sadly not a lot of documentation is available. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223
  • comex 6y ago
    Except that those aren't offered up to every website you visit.
    • dialtone 6y ago
      Very thin distinction here given that they can still be purchased by advertisers and Apple has every interest in being the only company monetizing on their platform so the number of parties seeing this is irrelevant if the point was the surveillance problem.
      • pvg 6y ago
        'Ads you see on the App store or Apple News' and 'ads on the the entire web' is very substantial distinction, as is the scope of the surveillance involved. Another one big one is - you can turn the Apple thing off.
        • dialtone 6y ago
          This is a pretty naive argument and distinction as well. It's pretty obvious Apple doesn't have financially valuable properties on the web but they have plenty in their application ecosystem. In Apple's view Apple News is how people consume news, not go to the web where the user experience isn't custom tailored by Apple. Apple News is barely different than Google AMP that everyone rages against, try to get someone to share a link to a piece of news from Apple News and it will come with the ask to subscribe or download it. So in Apple's ideal plan almost every place where today ads are displayed will be inside Apple News. And hey, I wasn't aware there exist another App Store where people can buy applications or in-app purchases on iOS. And yeah you can turn FLoC off too both today and when it will be in production. Lastly, when did the argument move from "advertising bad, tracking data always bad, targeted advertising terrible" to "if Apple does it then I'm good with it"?
• einpoklum 6y ago
  So, FLoC is a mechanism for facilitating your being targeted by commercial propaganda, but not as accurate/personalized as other mechanisms by Google, Amazon and others. Am I getting it right? But - if the regular, more accurate/personalized, mechanisms work in Chromium - why use the less-accurate ones?
  • notriddle 6y ago
    1. The more accurate ones require a cookie banner. 2. The more accurate ones are going away.
  • kmundnic 6y ago
    This post might give some answers [1]. FL is a machine-learning framework where models can be trained while keeping users' data on their device rather than sending it to a server. [1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
  • jcampbell1 6y ago
    Because Chrome’s competitors have all gotten rid of 3rd party cookies for privacy reasons, and Chrome wants to launch and claim the same feature but not damage the ad business.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  aka lipstick on a pig. Google could easily kill brave by adopting its ads model.
• lumost 6y ago
  I would expect that it's practical to reverse engineer the cohorts into a browsing history. This means that an interested party could derive browsing information from a page visit rather than needing to instrument thousands of websites with cookies. There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms.
  • morelisp 6y ago
    Cohorts could be reverse-engineered to give you a probability space of browsing history, which would be identical for any user in the cohort given a single sample. > There isn't really any hard bound on how much information could be leaked via these algorithms. With ~33k cohorts, there is literally a hard bound of just above 15 bits per visit. That's still theoretically a lot if you have some other stable identifier, but practically speaking most users on most sites will have an identical cohort and it will drop off rapidly as cohorts stabilize into groups appropriate for ad targeting. Barring the other considerations I've mentioned in the comments here, that's still immeasurably better for individual privacy than ~infinite bits per visit from stable third-party cookies.
    • benatkin 6y ago
      Except the privacy conscious just won, so there is no need to compare it to the former status quo. Why squander our victory?
      • mavhc 6y ago
        If you want to pay to visit every site you go to, or see 10x as many ads because you'll be 10x less likely to find them useful, then you've won
        • benatkin 6y ago
          Yes please! We're already mostly there, so it's an empty promise!
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  > FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. Nevertheless it seems a formidable addition to a browser user fingerprint.
  • dialtone 6y ago
    Once again that's not how fingerprinting works... This thing changes all the time so not sure what fingerprint it can generate.
  • doomslice 6y ago
    FLOC is being introduced now in advance of privacy features coming in chrome (removal of third party cookie and privacy budget) which apparently will hurt ad revenue. FLOC is supposed to help targeting without exposing user data.
  • derekdahmer 6y ago
    The idea with this proposal is to avoid browser fingerprinting. Cross site cookies are going away and there are essentially two possible paths for ad networks to compensate: a common approach like FLoC is adopted, or ad networks will continue to do ever more advanced fingerprinting based on things that are identify you individually and hard to obfuscate like graphical rendering and audio quirks. The proposal is if Google adopts FLoC they won’t use browser fingerprinting. Which reality is better is up for debate but they won’t be doing both for the same client.
    • kelnos 6y ago
      There's a third option: we make it hard enough to fingerprint users that doing so is too costly when compared to what the ad networks gain from doing it.
      • iainmerrick 6y ago
        Costly to whom? Fingerprinting already slows down websites, and websites still use it extensively. The cost is paid by the users and nobody cares enough to fix it.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  From the README.md at https://github.com/WICG/floc https://github.com/WICG/floc: "This API democratizes access to some information about an individual's general browsing history (and thus, general interests) to any site that opts into it. This is in contrast to today's world, in which cookies or other tracking techniques may be used to collate someone's browsing activity across many sites." Can the user detemrine whether a site has opted in without sending an HTTP request the site (and thereby recording the access in her browsing history). "Sites that know a person's PII (e.g., when people sign in using their email address) could record and reveal their cohort. This means that information about an individual's interests may eventually become public. "As such, there will be people for whom providing this information in exchange for funding the web ecosystem is an unacceptable trade-off. Whether the browser sends a real FLoC or a random one is user controllable." Can advertisers determine whether a FLoC sent is real or random. I can imagine some FLoCs if sent would trigger ads that were undesirable, perhaps damaging to the user's reputation, embarassing, etc. As described, this system compels users to accept targeted advertising (what Google and Facebook want every user to do). There is no opt-out. There is no such thing as non-targeted ads. Users of browsers that support FLoC can either send real FLoC or random FLoC, but they cannot send no FLoC. If they choose randomised FLoC, they might receive ads targeted to cohorts with which they do not want to be identified. As the next paragraph states, the FLoC when compbinaed with other data can indeed be used as an user identifier. Choosing "randomised FLoC" might mean being publicly identified with undesirable cohorts. For example, IP address might become associated with an undesirable cohort. "A cohort could be used as a user identifier. It may not have enough bits of information to individually identify someone, but in combination with other information (such as an IP address), it might." "The expectation is that the user's FLoC will be updated over time, so that it continues to have advertising utility. The privacy impacts of this need to be taken into consideration. For instance, multiple FLoC samples means that more information about a user's browsing history is revealed over time." "Second, if cohorts can be used for tracking, then having more interest cohort samples for a user will make it easier to reidentify them on other sites that have observed the same sequence of cohorts for a user." "A cohort might reveal sensitive information." "Some people are sensitive to categories that others are not, and there is no globally accepted notion of sensitive categories." "It should be clear that FLoC will never be able to prevent all misuse. There will be categories that are sensitive in contexts that weren't predicted." "A site should be able to declare that it does not want to be included in the user's list of sites for cohort calculation. This can be accomplished via a new interest-cohort permissions policy. This policy will be default allow." Default is no privacy. Nice. "... a site can opt out of all FLoC cohort calculation by sending the HTTP response header: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()" Proxy config: http-response add-header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort()" "We will analyze the resulting cohorts for correlations between cohort and sensitive categories, including the prohibited categories defined here. This analysis is designed to protect user privacy by evaluating only whether a cohort may be sensitive, in the abstract, without learning why it is sensitive, i.e., without computing or otherwise inferring specific sensitive categories that may be associated with that cohort. Cohorts that reveal sensitive categories will be blocked or the clustering algorithm will be reconfigured to reduce the correlation." Well, this appears to negate the claim that no browsing history is sent to the browser vendor. To conduct experiments and develop this system, Google needs to collect and process user browsing histories.
• TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  What a piece of flaming poop.
• roody15 6y ago
  The issue with FLoC is it based on a false premise. Advertising can be successful without needing to build a tracking profile on a person as they traverse multiple websites. For example if I visit a website that follows trends in computer hardware... advertisers may pay to put ads in this site to PC parts, etc. If I visit a site about popular camping locations.. advertisers can purchase ads that are relevant to camping,gear, travel etc. The very idea that we need a tracking identity that monitors and identifies behavior from site to site is ridiculous.
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    That retargeting goes away with many of the changes that are being pushed
  • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    It's based on a lie, but it's also a lie that's entirely fundamental to Google's existence: The reason Google is the giant it is is because of the delusion you need user tracking and that only Google has enough user data to do it well. If you get rid of user tracking, anyone or their brother can sell ads, and then why deal with Google?
  • krisdol 6y ago
    This is called contextual advertising, fyi.
  • charcircuit 6y ago
    If you were right Google would not have personalized ads enabled by default.
• bloaf 6y ago
  Could we just make something that spams the FLoC algorithm with garbage so we get put in random interest cohorts?