4 ms·

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,

by 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
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ "Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset." Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.
        xvector 6y ago
        That site seems to be pretty buggy. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ has more visitors and seems to have a wider collection. With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.
        mnw21cam 6y ago
        It turns out my browser is unique just based on the http_accept header alone. How the heck did we end up in that situation?
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        It's similar to Spectre. We had more pressing issues back then. As those issues are solved, we moved to more tricky ones which did not get much attention before.
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      You're going to drive yourself crazy if you try to make sense of "privacy"-advocate objections on an object level. It's not actually about privacy. No matter how much FLoC or something FLoC-like preserves your actual privacy, advocates will be against it. That's because they don't actually care about privacy and have always used concerns about "privacy" as a pretext for killing ads.
      - o_p 6y ago
        Fingerprinting is hardly just advertising.
        quotemstr 6y ago
        Then fix fingerprinting. "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.
        o_p 6y ago
        True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. Id gladly pay for my content just to watch the ad-tech industry die, its not just about "ads", they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
        quotemstr 6y ago
        > True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. But why? > they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state. But FLoC is explicitly about doing ads in a way that does not lead to a "surveillance police state". So why is it bad?
        o_p 6y ago
        There are no specifications about what the cohorts will be, Google is literally leaving that for the ad companies to figure it out. It wouldnt be suprising it at all they realize a way to make small enough cohorts in such a way you can be fingerprinted. The bottom line is that you are giving them your browsing data, obfuscated by fancy algorithms. Unless you trust ad-tech to have the best interests about your privacy (ha!)
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    It cuts down the fingerprint to a pool of just a few thousand and then you can just use other fingerprint items to get down to a completely unique id that you can track.
- mikl 6y ago
  Yeah, and every time you log in somewhere, they can link your FLoC cohort to your real identity and use the information to build a profile on you.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  > you only send your interest categories Not sure why it is supposed to be significant improvement. "FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However [a tracker now] only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million). In information theoretic terms, FLoC cohorts will contain several bits of entropy—up to 8 bits, in Google’s proof of concept trial. This information is even more potent given that it is unlikely to be correlated with other information that the browser exposes. This will make it much easier for trackers to put together a unique fingerprint for FLoC users." "as your FLoC cohort will update over time, sites that can identify you in other ways will also be able to track how your browsing changes [...] a FLoC cohort is nothing more, and nothing less, than a summary of your recent browsing activity." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
morelisp 6y ago
> Big Ad (aka. Google and its ilk) So to be clear, "Big Ad" is like, dentsu, Publicis, Omnicom, etc. Companies that don't show up on HN much (but do ultimately buy the services which pay a ton of HNer's salaries). They don't like Google very much, but Google owns a ton of space to put ads on, lots of first-party traffic with interesting properties, and more accurate targeting models than most other companies combined. So they have to work together. Real Big Ad would all rather keep the third-party cookie and not have to deal with FLoC, because they know they're already trapped in dealing with Google based on market demands, and FLoC will give Google even more forceful technical leverage.
- mikl 6y ago
  Google is an integrated part of “Big Ad”, they’re the largest advertising company in the world. And now they’re using their ownership of the most popular browser to sneakily install FLoC on their unwitting user’s machines.
  - morelisp 6y ago
    > Google is an integrated part of “Big Ad” If you view the market through only this lens it becomes very easy for partisan interests (e.g. Brave, just as much an advertising company as Google) to trick you. Google is notable for how disintegrated it is from the rest of the ad business, between its technology monopolies and vertical integrations.

by mikl 6y ago

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
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ "Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset." Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.
      - xvector 6y ago
        That site seems to be pretty buggy. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ has more visitors and seems to have a wider collection. With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.
        mnw21cam 6y ago
        It turns out my browser is unique just based on the http_accept header alone. How the heck did we end up in that situation?
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        It's similar to Spectre. We had more pressing issues back then. As those issues are solved, we moved to more tricky ones which did not get much attention before.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    You're going to drive yourself crazy if you try to make sense of "privacy"-advocate objections on an object level. It's not actually about privacy. No matter how much FLoC or something FLoC-like preserves your actual privacy, advocates will be against it. That's because they don't actually care about privacy and have always used concerns about "privacy" as a pretext for killing ads.
    - o_p 6y ago
      Fingerprinting is hardly just advertising.
      - quotemstr 6y ago
        Then fix fingerprinting. "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.
        o_p 6y ago
        True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. Id gladly pay for my content just to watch the ad-tech industry die, its not just about "ads", they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
        quotemstr 6y ago
        > True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point. But why? > they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state. But FLoC is explicitly about doing ads in a way that does not lead to a "surveillance police state". So why is it bad?
        o_p 6y ago
        There are no specifications about what the cohorts will be, Google is literally leaving that for the ad companies to figure it out. It wouldnt be suprising it at all they realize a way to make small enough cohorts in such a way you can be fingerprinted. The bottom line is that you are giving them your browsing data, obfuscated by fancy algorithms. Unless you trust ad-tech to have the best interests about your privacy (ha!)
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It cuts down the fingerprint to a pool of just a few thousand and then you can just use other fingerprint items to get down to a completely unique id that you can track.
mikl 6y ago
Yeah, and every time you log in somewhere, they can link your FLoC cohort to your real identity and use the information to build a profile on you.
matkoniecz 6y ago
> you only send your interest categories Not sure why it is supposed to be significant improvement. "FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However [a tracker now] only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million). In information theoretic terms, FLoC cohorts will contain several bits of entropy—up to 8 bits, in Google’s proof of concept trial. This information is even more potent given that it is unlikely to be correlated with other information that the browser exposes. This will make it much easier for trackers to put together a unique fingerprint for FLoC users." "as your FLoC cohort will update over time, sites that can identify you in other ways will also be able to track how your browsing changes [...] a FLoC cohort is nothing more, and nothing less, than a summary of your recent browsing activity." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

morelisp 6y ago

> Big Ad (aka. Google and its ilk) So to be clear, "Big Ad" is like, dentsu, Publicis, Omnicom, etc. Companies that don't show up on HN much (but do ultimately buy the services which pay a ton of HNer's salaries). They don't like Google very much, but Google owns a ton of space to put ads on, lots of first-party traffic with interesting properties, and more accurate targeting models than most other companies combined. So they have to work together. Real Big Ad would all rather keep the third-party cookie and not have to deal with FLoC, because they know they're already trapped in dealing with Google based on market demands, and FLoC will give Google even more forceful technical leverage.

mikl 6y ago
Google is an integrated part of “Big Ad”, they’re the largest advertising company in the world. And now they’re using their ownership of the most popular browser to sneakily install FLoC on their unwitting user’s machines.
- morelisp 6y ago
  > Google is an integrated part of “Big Ad” If you view the market through only this lens it becomes very easy for partisan interests (e.g. Brave, just as much an advertising company as Google) to trick you. Google is notable for how disintegrated it is from the rest of the ad business, between its technology monopolies and vertical integrations.