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I’m sure there has to be a better way to introduce the audience to FLoC. I’m over five paragraphs in and the article hasn’t properly articulated what is FLoC an

I’m sure there has to be a better way to introduce the audience to FLoC. I’m over five paragraphs in and the article hasn’t properly articulated what is FLoC and _why_ it is bad. Just that it is bad.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago
I wonder if that's because there's no short way to describe FLoC in a way that makes it sound bad for users. They'd need one paragraph to introduce FLoC, then another three making nuanced arguments about how it's actually worse than the status quo, and only then could they get to the core post about not supporting it. Better to avoid that fire and just let the reader infer FLoC is bad, whatever it is.
- dleslie 5y ago
  FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. That wasn't hard.
  - crazypython 5y ago
    I just don't like how FLoC was implemented. No opt-in or opt-out consent. Written completely by Google employees. Not approved by Privacy Interest Group, Web Technical Architecture Group, or WICG. No control over which cohort you are in, despite being able to add this feature. If it was complemented with a Privacy Budget API– each privacy-losing API call costs budget and there is a limit– to eliminate other factors for fingerprinting and IDing that you can combine with FLoC to unique track people– thus giving advertisers complete browsing history– then I'd reconsider. Another thing is webmasters can opt-out of FLoC through a header. But many webmasters don't control headers... And on top of the practical consequences of its implementation.... not good.
    - izacus 5y ago
      How exactly could it be implemented though? EFF and Firefox immediately started a session attacking anything similar to it and demanding that ALL targeting ads stop. There doesn't seem to be space for dialog or a common standard here, either Google does it or they fail and Firefox and privacy wins the world!
      - ev1 5y ago
        What ever happened to non-tracking contextual ads? If I browse stackoverflow I'm probably looking for some saas, or tech related, or a react training course on a react question. If I browse game sites maybe I want a MMORPG promo or time card sale. I don't want to see an ad to buy more toilets after having purchased a toilet once a month ago that is supposed to last decades. On every single site. For the next year.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    >FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. > That wasn't hard. It also doesn't explain why that's worse than the current practice of directly identifying individuals. Which is the hard bit.
    - tmottabr 5y ago
      in practice it is the same thing.. they will still be able to identify you individually.. floc actually might make it easier by first assigning you to group of just a few thousands other people.. that mean they just need a few extra bits of fingerprinting to identify you uniquely from there.. also previously they could only track were you had being if there was an ad in that page or if it had a social media button basically they could store a cookie or run a script in a specific context of a specific site and now they knew you visited that site.. now with floc they can track you everywhere, even sites that do not have ads or buttons will be included when calculating your floc..
kristofferR 5y ago
Please RTFA before commenting, they explain it very well further down. The subsection literally has the header "How does FloC work?", not exactly hard to find.
- frombody 5y ago
  No need to be so harsh. I read their comment as a simple suggestion to the author to introduce the topic before discussing it.
paxys 5y ago
There is enough preexsting content that introduces FLoC. That is not the purpose of this article.
sergiotapia 5y ago
This is honestly the best page I ever read that explains what floc is. Please finish reading the article. Your 1 paragraph was a bit further down.
cglong 5y ago
The EFF article helped me: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 5y ago
  Really informative read, thanks!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ramses0 5y ago
I'll take a stab. Suppose your browser told every website you visited that you had the identifier "FAANG", and your friends web browser told every website they visited: "FAA_G" (b/c obviously they don't have netflix). Per the linked article, the browser is filling in the blanks "___N_" as you visit each website, but it's telling each website not _what_ site you visited, but that you are in the groups of "FAA_G" vs. "FAANG". The browser manufacturer is effectively seeing every user for what they are (all the letters of the alphabet, as it were), and each site is only seeing a hash/digest/cohort/group, but those group segregations are not coming from particular "networks of websites", but instead from the browser itself. The end result is that you can't trust the browser b/c it might be (ed: it is!) spying on you. Google started removing the URL bar and replacing it with the omni-box. Instead of https://google.com/ https://google.com/ => ?q=guitar, you would simply type "guitar" into the URL bar. The lesson here is to reduce the number of intermediaries between you and your customer. Own the hardware, the screen, the operating system, the network, _everything_ between your CPU's and the user's eyeballs. (or in amazon's case, the manufacturer, the boxes, the website, the shipper, the TV, etc.). (or in netflix's case, the content, the edge-cache storage tank, the TV, the remote control, the pixels, etc.)
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  If I am reading this right (and you seem to have read it the same way) it ends up creating a browser fingerprint. Visit 1 FLoC and they have no real idea who you really are. But if you visit several they could easily tell. Which is similar to how they use your installed list of fonts to identify you. But more formalized?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    That compromise would require knowing who someone actually is between site and site - you could collect the full list of cohorts but you'd need additional information to be able to marry all that data together - let's say something like facebook injecting JS into every page on the internet to harvest cohort information and then gleefully reselling that information.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
lmkg 5y ago
The primary intended audience for this article is people Googling either "does vivaldi use floc" or "what browsers don't have floc." The secondary audience is giving Vivaldi fans an easy way to answer when someone asks those same questions on social media. So it's mostly targeted at people who have at least a vague idea already what FLoC is. And for that audience, the content flow is ideal: the article leads with a direct at straightforward answer to the question at hand.
whydoineedthis 5y ago
I thought the same thing, you indeed have to scroll a ways down, but it is there. There is a better explanation here https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-google-chrome-floc-cookies-cookiepocalypse-finger-printing https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-goog...

tobyjsullivan 5y ago

I wonder if that's because there's no short way to describe FLoC in a way that makes it sound bad for users. They'd need one paragraph to introduce FLoC, then another three making nuanced arguments about how it's actually worse than the status quo, and only then could they get to the core post about not supporting it. Better to avoid that fire and just let the reader infer FLoC is bad, whatever it is.

dleslie 5y ago
FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. That wasn't hard.
- crazypython 5y ago
  I just don't like how FLoC was implemented. No opt-in or opt-out consent. Written completely by Google employees. Not approved by Privacy Interest Group, Web Technical Architecture Group, or WICG. No control over which cohort you are in, despite being able to add this feature. If it was complemented with a Privacy Budget API– each privacy-losing API call costs budget and there is a limit– to eliminate other factors for fingerprinting and IDing that you can combine with FLoC to unique track people– thus giving advertisers complete browsing history– then I'd reconsider. Another thing is webmasters can opt-out of FLoC through a header. But many webmasters don't control headers... And on top of the practical consequences of its implementation.... not good.
  - izacus 5y ago
    How exactly could it be implemented though? EFF and Firefox immediately started a session attacking anything similar to it and demanding that ALL targeting ads stop. There doesn't seem to be space for dialog or a common standard here, either Google does it or they fail and Firefox and privacy wins the world!
    - ev1 5y ago
      What ever happened to non-tracking contextual ads? If I browse stackoverflow I'm probably looking for some saas, or tech related, or a react training course on a react question. If I browse game sites maybe I want a MMORPG promo or time card sale. I don't want to see an ad to buy more toilets after having purchased a toilet once a month ago that is supposed to last decades. On every single site. For the next year.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  >FLoC is a granular identifier that groups users into cohorts of a few dozen thousand based upon their recent browsing history, allowing advertisers to uniquely identify users with only a few additional bits of information _and_ more easily collaborate to identify a user's browsing history. > That wasn't hard. It also doesn't explain why that's worse than the current practice of directly identifying individuals. Which is the hard bit.
  - tmottabr 5y ago
    in practice it is the same thing.. they will still be able to identify you individually.. floc actually might make it easier by first assigning you to group of just a few thousands other people.. that mean they just need a few extra bits of fingerprinting to identify you uniquely from there.. also previously they could only track were you had being if there was an ad in that page or if it had a social media button basically they could store a cookie or run a script in a specific context of a specific site and now they knew you visited that site.. now with floc they can track you everywhere, even sites that do not have ads or buttons will be included when calculating your floc..

kristofferR 5y ago

Please RTFA before commenting, they explain it very well further down. The subsection literally has the header "How does FloC work?", not exactly hard to find.

frombody 5y ago
No need to be so harsh. I read their comment as a simple suggestion to the author to introduce the topic before discussing it.

paxys 5y ago

There is enough preexsting content that introduces FLoC. That is not the purpose of this article.

sergiotapia 5y ago

This is honestly the best page I ever read that explains what floc is. Please finish reading the article. Your 1 paragraph was a bit further down.

cglong 5y ago

The EFF article helped me: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

2T1Qka0rEiPr 5y ago
Really informative read, thanks!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ramses0 5y ago

I'll take a stab. Suppose your browser told every website you visited that you had the identifier "FAANG", and your friends web browser told every website they visited: "FAA_G" (b/c obviously they don't have netflix). Per the linked article, the browser is filling in the blanks "___N_" as you visit each website, but it's telling each website not _what_ site you visited, but that you are in the groups of "FAA_G" vs. "FAANG". The browser manufacturer is effectively seeing every user for what they are (all the letters of the alphabet, as it were), and each site is only seeing a hash/digest/cohort/group, but those group segregations are not coming from particular "networks of websites", but instead from the browser itself. The end result is that you can't trust the browser b/c it might be (ed: it is!) spying on you. Google started removing the URL bar and replacing it with the omni-box. Instead of https://google.com/ https://google.com/ => ?q=guitar, you would simply type "guitar" into the URL bar. The lesson here is to reduce the number of intermediaries between you and your customer. Own the hardware, the screen, the operating system, the network, _everything_ between your CPU's and the user's eyeballs. (or in amazon's case, the manufacturer, the boxes, the website, the shipper, the TV, etc.). (or in netflix's case, the content, the edge-cache storage tank, the TV, the remote control, the pixels, etc.)

sumtechguy 5y ago
If I am reading this right (and you seem to have read it the same way) it ends up creating a browser fingerprint. Visit 1 FLoC and they have no real idea who you really are. But if you visit several they could easily tell. Which is similar to how they use your installed list of fonts to identify you. But more formalized?
- munk-a 5y ago
  That compromise would require knowing who someone actually is between site and site - you could collect the full list of cohorts but you'd need additional information to be able to marry all that data together - let's say something like facebook injecting JS into every page on the internet to harvest cohort information and then gleefully reselling that information.
- joshuamorton 5y ago

lmkg 5y ago

The primary intended audience for this article is people Googling either "does vivaldi use floc" or "what browsers don't have floc." The secondary audience is giving Vivaldi fans an easy way to answer when someone asks those same questions on social media. So it's mostly targeted at people who have at least a vague idea already what FLoC is. And for that audience, the content flow is ideal: the article leads with a direct at straightforward answer to the question at hand.

whydoineedthis 5y ago

I thought the same thing, you indeed have to scroll a ways down, but it is there. There is a better explanation here https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-google-chrome-floc-cookies-cookiepocalypse-finger-printing https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-goog...