18 ms·

Cohort IDs can be collected over time to create cross-site tracking IDs

397 points by Hard_Space 6y ago

unicornporn 6y ago
Switch browser while you can. Firefox might not be perfect (or even getting slightly worse), but at least it's an alternative and I can easily say it's better than Chromium in most. At least ad blocking worka as it should.
- prezjordan 6y ago
  I ignored this advice for several years but ~6 months ago switched to Firefox cold turkey and don't miss Chrome one bit. Even when doing web development (I thought I'd miss chrome's CSS/HTML/JS inspector and devtools in general but Firefox's are the same if not better)
  - CyberFoxar 6y ago
    I find the dev tools of firefox even better. The ability to see XHR request content/header/responses directly in the Javascript console has been invaluable to me. It annoys me that chrome's console does not have this. You can only see when a request is made, but you have to hop on the network tab to see the actual content.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > (or even getting slightly worse) FWIW, it has only been getting better for me
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    Yeah strong agree, apart from the mess up with Firefox on Android. Both at home and work, Firefox desktop (with uBlock Origin) has been a pretty frictionless tool in terms of my browsing experience these past years, across Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.
    - Mudface_72 6y ago
      Try firefox lite , you can get it on uptodown and apkmirror, its is not available in the play store for all regions.
      - Groxx 6y ago
        From a quick glance, this seems to be even further down the "messy" side of the firefox-on-android mess. I.e. its capabilities are even more restricted. Which is not to say it's not useful, and TIL - I didn't know they had released this, so thanks :) But I don't think it particularly applies to this thread.
        Daho0n 6y ago
        What is the 'messy' problem with Firefox on Android? I have moved those I help with tech to Firefox. My mother for example. They don't know the difference between "the internet" and "Firefox" but so far they run Firefox with UBO with no problems (well not anything new that wasn't there with Chrome too but that is a old people Vs tech problem not unique to Firefox). Anything I need to know?
        Groxx 6y ago
        The messy problem is that you used to be able to run uBO with no problems on Firefox on Android. And most other extensions, with some obvious limitations (e.g. desktop-only UI extensions didn't work, some UIs weren't mobile-friendly, etc). Then they released a preview of a re-design which also broke all extensions. That's arguably fine for a preview, though a bit concerning. Many were raising alarms at this point. Then they released the re-design to the stable release, with still-broken extensions. This pretty unambiguously is "a mess", if not earlier. Then they released built-in support for a couple dozen Mozilla-selected extensions (uBO included, I believe). This is still a mess, and rightfully raises a few eyebrows. ... and we're still there now, after over a year of "this will be fixed soon". I believe you can install nightly + manually tweak config and still install other extensions, but Firefox for Android does not support extensions right now. That's A Problem™, and not a good sign for extension-longevity that it was ever allowed out of preview. It broadly implies extensions are very low on their priority list, which is concerning, as extensions have been the clear leaders on preserving privacy and user control in general. Browsers overwhelmingly follow popular extension behaviors, not the other way around - cripple extensions and you also cripple advancement and experimentation.
- waheoo 6y ago
  What? I switched a couple years ago, chrome is a mess whenever I'm forced to use it.
- eplanit 6y ago
  I have noticed a recent decline in the debugging features of FF -- downright buggy. View source shows a form I used 3 pages ago, not the form rendered. I now switch to chrome just for debugging.
  - foepys 6y ago
    You don't deserve the downvotes. We are using mainly Firefox at work and sometimes, not often but sometimes, Firefox refuses to load the current file in the debugger. The only solution is to restart Firefox. I get why some are annoyed by this when they are in a debugging session. Although the last time it happened to me was one or two Firefox releases ago. Maybe it got fixed.
    - hosteur 6y ago
      Did you report the problem?
      - foepys 6y ago
        No because I cannot reproduce it. It just happened randomly in the past. As I don't like getting bug reports that boil down to "doesn't work", I don't create them myself.
        kevingadd 6y ago
        When struggling with a persistent issue like this in FF devtools it can still be worth filing an issue on the bugzilla tracker. Worst case, it gets closed as not reproducible. In practice many of these issues will eventually get caught if enough people complain about them and someone manages to dig through all the reports and come up with theories about the issue. You may get a helpful reply from someone on the team with suggestions on how to troubleshoot it, like enabling specific logging flags or pulling some info out of the console. I've filed lots of bug reports against Firefox in the past and just because you don't have an isolated reproduction case for a devtools issue, that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
    - 6y ago
- alert0 6y ago
  I switched to Firefox for container tabs a few years ago and love it.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
  The only thing that keeps me using Chrome from time time is the in-place translation feature. If anything comparable was added to Firefox (which I mainly use), I would be more than happy to get rid of Chrome once and for all. And yes, I'm aware of the extensions that offer similar functionality, but unfortunately they still have some way to go before they can reach parity with Chrome translator.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    In-place translating is the feature that really missed on other browsers. Edge also works well with Bing translate. I wish DeepL provides translate extension.
- knalum 6y ago
  Switched to Brave on mobile. Never looked back. You can see how many mb of data saved due to blocking of trackers.
  - Mudface_72 6y ago
    Try firefox lite , get the apk from uptodiwn or apkmirror, because ff lite is region locked in the playstore.
    - Brian_K_White 6y ago
      Dude wtf, not interested in your Watchtower or whatever.
- InvOfSmallC 6y ago
  Firefox Focus is the best.
- bentcorner 6y ago
  I stay on Firefox because of UBO and containers, but when I discovered tree-style tabs I'll likely never leave. Edge has an ok-ish implementation of vertical tabs but it still has a ways to go to match tree-style tabs.
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    I've been a Tree Style Tab user for many years, but I have to confess I have a complicated relationship with this add-on. I've reached >600 tabs more than once. That's not only a feature.
    - qwertox 6y ago
      I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox. Having three rows of tabs and the ability to scroll them vertically for more tabs was the absolute killer feature for me. I loved Firefox for this. Once Firefox moved to the per-process approach and removed the ability to hack the UI, I saw no more reason to stay on what was a terribly slow browser back then, compared to Chrome. Startup times of 10+ seconds and such shenanigans.
    - petepete 6y ago
      When you have more than (say) twenty, what does having a tab open give you that bookmarking the page doesn't?
      - unicornporn 6y ago
        I do well with Max Tabs set to 60 when researching something. Anything above that is just bad habits.
- barbazoo 6y ago
  What do I, as an end user, have to do to be protected? Is it sufficient to use Firefox with its default settings? Honestly I don't know and I think I should. I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs installed on Firefox, I'm running pi-hole at home, it's just so much.
  - surround 6y ago
    Don't sweat it. All you really need is Firefox + uBlock Origin. And even without uBo, Firefox blocks some trackers by default. Privacy badger is largely useless ever since they got rid of heuristics. ClearURLs is useful, but you'd probably be fine without it. And pi-hole doesn't block anything that uBo doesn't in Firefox (but is still useful for applications outside of the browser). On the other hand, maybe you're like me and want to squeeze as much privacy out of your browser as you can, even if it means breaking some websites. If that's the case, check this website out. Just remember that the tweaks listed here are nice, but not entirely necessary. https://privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config https://privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config
    - barbazoo 6y ago
      Thank you, I'll have a look!
    - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      With uBO, I would also disable things like Third-Party Cookies. I also have No-Script, but that's mainly for making sites easier to load (Though it does block ad-tracking js-files, like uBO).
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Under Enhanced Tracking Protection, select the Strict option. Firefox also has native HTTPS-only and ESNI features.
- prepend 6y ago
  I only use Chrome for Google stuff and everything else is split across Brave, Safari, Edge, and Firefox.
- 55555 6y ago
  What's the most frictionless page language translation plugin?
- sneak 6y ago
  The security sandboxing of Chromium-based browsers is sadly unmatched, however.
- julianlam 6y ago
  I'm a huge proponent of Firefox on desktop, but the new Firefox on mobile is just awful awful awful. I've switched to Vivaldi and it's just much snappier and doesn't have the papercuts FF mobile is currently struggling through. Total rewrites are cool, but they're real rough around the edges at first.
  - Mudface_72 6y ago
    Try firefox lite, get it on uptodown or apkmirror. Its has a region lock an the ppay store.
  - Mudface_72 6y ago
    Try firefox lite on android, you can dl the apk on uptodown or apkmirror, its region locked in the playstore.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    > I'm a huge proponent of Firefox on desktop, but the new Firefox on mobile is just awful awful awful. I strongly disagree. There are certainly issues, many of which are a result of the recent redesign, but I still find it a much better experience than Chrome on mobile and I think calling it "awful" is hyperbolic. Here are some examples of why I think FF > Chrome on mobile: Firefox mobile supports extensions which I consider necessary at this point, such as uBlock Origin. I can put the address bar at the bottom, where my fingers are. The reader features makes many websites much easier to read - particularly on mobile. Chrome defaults to opening things in tab groups now, which I find to be much more finicky to use than normal tabs. Bookmarks are for saving pages long-term, not tabs.
  - vharuck 6y ago
    I'm with you. I preferred the previous version of Firefox on Android. Since switching to the new version: - I've noticed it crashes much more. - It still doesn't support all the extensions I used to have, like uMatrix. - All my bookmarks disappeared when it updated to the new version. I know syncing bookmarks would've let me recover, but I didn't realize it'd happen on the first place. And it seems like an easy problem to Amos even if a user didn't sync.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  It’s a fine browser and it is really important to make sure the landscape is not dominated by one engine.
- qwertox 6y ago
  Please educate me: I am a Chrome user and I do rely on browser syncing my tabs and some passwords. I know that Firefox also has a syncing feature ("Sign into Firefox", "Continue to Firefox Sync"). My problem is that I don't trust Mozilla's ability to keep this data secure. I believe that sooner or later they are going to get hacked, and that data will leak. The same might happen to Google, but I also believe that no other company has the degree of expertise of Google to protect that data. Am I wrong in this assumption? Does Firefox Sync end-to-end encrypt the data, without knowing the key, like Google's Sync Passphrase feature? What are your experiences with Firefox Sync? Does it work just as good as Chrome's, or even better?
  - foobiter 6y ago
    why do you trust google to do it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chillydawg 6y ago
    it's encrypted, they store the blob and ship it to any browser that auths correctly. sync works just fine.
  - klondike_ 6y ago
    You can actually self host Firefox Sync on your own server if you want.
  - DenseComet 6y ago
    I've had a pretty good experience with Firefox Sync, although I don't use it for passwords. Firefox Sync has E2E encryption to ensure that Mozilla doesn't have the ability to view any of your data. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
  - Ayesh 6y ago
    Tl;Dr: Extremely satisfied and using on three devices. The sync server is open source and free, so you can host an instance yourself if you'd like. Firefox accounts have 2FA support, and passwords are end to end synced anyway, so even if your Firefox account is compromised, nobody can recover data without the key. For about a decade in the working, there were zero breaches in mozilla AFAIK. I use Firefox sync in my Windows laptop, Firefox on Android beta. There is also an app called Lockwise that can work as a standalone app and a password fill feature for other apps as well.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  I use Safari as my primary browser on MacOS, Chrome is only used for the developer mode. Dunno if it's better than the one in Firefox, but it's the one I know =)
- sedatk 6y ago
  Is FLOC going to be integrated into Chromium or is it just going to be a Chrome feature?
  - foobiter 6y ago
    the intention is to make it a web standard, so the end goal is to put it in all browsers
- smt1 6y ago
  Also consider, for example, Brave. https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/ https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/
vxNsr 6y ago
Kinda sucks for google that within 2 months of them beginning their trial it’s already got a million holes in it. Do you think they keep going bec they don’t actually care about the privacy implications or do you think they try to “legislate” their way out of it by adding something to the EULA of the FLoC program that you can’t share IDs. So they can say “see we don’t allow it” and can pretend no one is gonna do it behind their back.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  That’s how you find holes, by running trials. Remember that this isn’t a privacy regression; they’re trying to find an ad-friendly replacement for third party cookies, which can do cross-site tracking without any need for holes.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    It’s a regression bec they’re taking control away from the users, you can decide to not allow 3rd party cookies, but you can’t opt out of FLoC very easily.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      It's my understanding (source: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/privacy/2021/04/millions-of-chrome-users-quietly-added-to-googles-floc-pilot/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/privacy/2021/04/mil...) that users who opt out of third-party cookies are also opted out of the FLoC trial. I do agree that more granular controls would have been ideal.
- xg15 6y ago
  I thought FLoC was supposed to become yet another DOM API that any Javascript of any web page you visit can access (if Google got their way). Where would there even be an EULA to sign?
  - foobiter 6y ago
    all the data gathered by floc is algorithmically categorized and anonymized by google, they also determine what qualifies as a “protected” content
robin_reala 6y ago
Remember, as a site owner you can choose to stop your website participating in Google’s user tracking by sending this header: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()
- inetknght 6y ago
  So not only do users need to actually opt-out but site owners have to opt-out too? Has anyone stopped to consider where laws and regulations should come in to say that tracking like this is far too invasive?
  - robin_reala 6y ago
    You don’t have to, what happens between a user and their browser is theoretically none of your business. But if you care about your users’ privacy, I see no reason not to send this header as there’s no defined value for you as a business (unless you plan to somehow try to retarget users who’ve visited your site based on guessing which cohort that potentially refers to).
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    > So not only do users need to actually opt-out but site owners have to opt-out too? By setting this on the site level, your users won't have to opt-out. You are doing it for them (all of them). If you don't, then the browser can always ignore it also. But that would only affect that individual user.
    - mark_and_sweep 6y ago
      Weird question: What if a user actually wants to opt-in but the site has opted-out? Should user opt-in override site opt-out?
      - robin_reala 6y ago
        The user opts in to being placed into a cohort. The site opts out of providing information to Google to let them generate cohorts based on the site. There’s no overlap.
leephillips 6y ago
I think it’s potentially even worse than this. We seem to have to re-learn this lesson periodically: seemingly anonymous data about groups of people does confer the ability to identify individuals: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/anonymous-data-might-not-be-so-anonymous-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/anonymous-data-might-not-be-...
- EGreg 6y ago
  Basically, take it to its logical conclusion Privacy is dead. Once they have ubiquitous cameras everywhere, and connect the databases, the AI can correlate everything you do, and infer who is meeting whom and for what etc. Similarly online. You are going to get deanonymized unless you go to great lengths to change everything about what you do, including not doing anything in real time. More info: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169?p=169 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169?p=169 JK Rowling: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-comput... And the mac daddy: https://news.bitcoin.com/a-look-at-stylometry-can-we-uncover-satoshi-through-literary-quirks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/a-look-at-stylometry-can-we-uncover...
  - Retric 6y ago
    It’s still possible to be anonymous online, most people simply are unwilling to make any tradeoffs for privacy.
    - adamiscool8 6y ago
      Is it possible to be anonymous online and still engage in the "online world" as most non-tech folks see it? Increasingly I think the answer is no, without substantial tradeoffs.
      - Retric 6y ago
        It comes down to what you want in terms of anonymity. You can’t anonymously order food from an app and have it sent to your house while posting your wedding photos on Facebook. But, if you want to anonymously browse the web and talk to people on HN then that’s still possible.
ghughes 6y ago
ICYMI, this analysis is written by the principal engineer behind Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari. John knows what he’s talking about.
- float4 6y ago
  ICYMI: In Case You Missed It
- brnt 6y ago
  Never thought I'd ask for this, but I wish Safari was available on Linux.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Well, it is! Just not the version you're hoping to use.
  - crazypython 6y ago
    I hear the performance and memory usage of WebKitGTK is much worse than WebKit on macOS.
    - brnt 6y ago
      You mean Midori (AFAIK the only browser using WebKit outside of Safari)?
      - SubzeroCarnage 6y ago
        Midori has been overhauled and is Electron based now. old [0] new [1] See also this extensive list of browsers [2]. [0] https://github.com/midori-browser/core https://github.com/midori-browser/core [1] https://gitlab.com/midori-web/midori-desktop https://gitlab.com/midori-web/midori-desktop [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Web_browsers#WebKit-based https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Web_browsers#WebKit-bas...
        6y ago
jonnycomputer 6y ago
Yesterday a video conferencing web application (that I had to use) refused to work with Firefox, saying that it did not meet minimum requirements, and that I needed to use Chrome or Safari instead. I'm curious whether there is an actual technical justification.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Get a user agent spoofer and find out. The answer's usually no.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    TIL. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...
- _flux 6y ago
  There could actually be technical reasons behind it, for example Jitsi had this bug open for quite a while: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 referring a few Firefox bugs - apparently mostly fixed by updates to Firefox; perhaps the vendors of your the web app you used didn't get the news yet.
twobitshifter 6y ago
Google must have seen this coming. It was never going to be the privacy savior Google billed it as, so why push forward with the concept? We have to look deeper to understand what value FLOC provides to Google. They can exclusively gather tracking info through the browser they control, and they can weaken competitor’s privacy arguments by claiming that they do not track individuals.
- Vespasian 6y ago
  Probably because they feel that the tide is turning against 3rd-party cookies and maybe even fear legislative action in some markets. The beauty is that Googles business works just fine with FLOC and their competitors don't. When third party trackers "abuse" the ids one "obvious" solution could be to only allow "trusted" advertisers to receive it. If, in a great stroke of fortune, the requirements to become trusted are basically "be Google" I wouldn't be surprised.
  - 015a 6y ago
    The worst part is actually, it will never look like "just be Google", because that would be too obviously evil and be subject to decisive legislative action. Google's Widevine (streaming media DRM) is a great correlate to this. If you wanted to try and create a great, novel 4th web engine/browser; good luck. Many of the major streaming sites use Widevine. You can't build a browser to stream that content without asking for access to Widevine encryption. Google will not give it to you; they may, eventually, if you build up enough of a userbase, but what browser would be able to build up that userbase without access to streaming media? Its less about building a bulwark around Google's technology, a clear monopoly, and moreso a bulwark around the Boys Club of Established Big Tech. Then Google can go to Congress and say "we have competition, look, Facebook serves ads".
    - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      Also we have to ask the question: does DRM like Widevine even work? One could just take a video recording of their Netflix stream using OBS or something similar, and Widevine can't even do anything to counter it.
pfortuny 6y ago
Well-known since the netflix prize challenge: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265973077_Robust_De-anonymization_of_Large_Datasets_How_to_Break_Anonymity_of_the_Netflix_Prize_Dataset https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265973077_Robust_De...
est 6y ago
What am I looking at? https://wicg.io/ https://wicg.io/ Jesus christ what a mess. This web browsing looks like navigating across a minefield.
EMM_386 6y ago
Note the suggestion they are looking into, making sites "sticky": https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7628fca2da8ace8d3 https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7... Although the follow-up comment summarizes why this probably won't work https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7628fca2da8ace8d3 https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7...
Taek 6y ago
I call it the privacy doom principle. Any information which separates you into a subset of a larger group can eventually be compounded to fully break your anonymity. I did a lot of work on privacy coins, and the power of statistics is staggering. Doesn't matter if you shield yourself by grouping with 100,000 people per transaction, if your anonymity set isn't _everyone_, eventually you can be singly identified. Same goes for browsers, tracking, and "anonymized data".
- prepend 6y ago
  Especially if you can belong to multiple 100,000 people groups. It doesn’t take very many until you can find an individual by looking at the intersections.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  So can privacy coins scale or all the efforts put there were futile?
  - Taek 6y ago
    Privacy coins can work if you can maintain the property that _every_ transaction could plausibly be spending _any_ historic output. For the most part, that's just Zcash-like coins
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      What about Monero?
      - Taek 6y ago
        Monero fails the privacy doom principle, eventually analytics will be enough to fully break it. In the long term, it's not really any safer than bitcoin.
        matheusmoreira 6y ago
throwaway189262 6y ago
Google's FLOC has an unfixable problem. As soon as other advertisers create their own FLOC's, anonymity goes away. No matter how careful Google is to make sure these ID's aren't unique, as soon as users have several FLOC identifiers, maybe even two, they're uniquely identifiable. Behavioral tracking needs to die. It was a mistake created from lack of web security in the early days, nothing more. It's a bug, not a feature. Google is finally showing us what Chrome was meant to be. A browser monopoly to defend Google's user tracking interests.
- jqpabc123 6y ago
  Privacy invasion and tracking is built into everything Google does. It's part of their DNA. No real need to look for details, if their name is on it, you know it's in there somewhere.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Making money off of you is their DNA; how they do it can change, and if they could make the same money or more (long-term) without actually storing advertising profiles, you bet they would.
    - jqpabc123 6y ago
      I'll bet that if they had some other way to make just as much as they do now, they would still store your profile and use it to make even more. In other words, the only way they will ever give up privacy invasion is if it is no longer profitable. That's kinda evil don't you think?
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  The browser provides FLOC IDs. How do you think other advertisers convince browser vendors (and particularly Google) to include support for their FLOC's?
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
dathinab 6y ago
Not really surprising just think about following: Cohorts are sized at "a few thousands" (what does that even mean?). There is a lot a heuristic information retrievable using JS. This is separate from the information Cohorts use to group you. Put both together and you have something quite close to a unique id. There is absolutely no way to fix this problem while having cohort id's and not having very very large cohorts. Which I can't see google using. Just as an example, I have a unusual setup so `coveryourtracks.eff.org` reports that my fingerprint is unique in the 292,340 tested in the last 45 days from heuristics alone. Thinks are not that bad for the average windows or mac user (me: Linux, Firefox, 1440p screen, etc. I'm not surprised tbh.). Still combined that "not so bad" with a FLoC Id and you are back at basically unequally identifiable. EDIT: Btw. there IS a fix, instead of letting advertisers decide on the ad based on you FLoC Id you let your Browser decide based an "available ad topic channels" (if combined with a fixed set of lables and a few other thinks, it's not trivial).
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Google's proposed solution to this is an "entropy budget". If you have already asked about other JS things that can be used for identification, you won't get a floc id.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    I can't imagine this working out tbh. You could always ask first for a FLoC Id and then ask for the JS things, it's a dynamic language and there are always corss-domain redirects with tracing in url Id's. Also some of them are very fundamental parts which are not at all thinks "you need to ask for". Like Chromium is a serve offender when it comes to accidentally providing unnecessary identifiable information. E.g. my Chromium user agent string is more identifiable then the Firefox one, the canvas fingerprints are way worse. There are additional attack vectors like list of plugins, some with names containing way to much information. Also just combining things like Language + TimeZone + User Agent are probably enough to narrow down a FLoC group from multiple thousand to just a view hundred or even less users if you are not in the US/China/India. (Or if you limit yourself to HTTP headers: user agent header + accept lang header + accept header + accept encoding header). Also don't forget you have a fixed Ip address as long as you don't to VPN perma-bouncing. IMHO all the "fixes" are trying to fix a massive hole with a few thin sheets of paper, i.e. at best it will look fixed, for a short moment. But it's not fixing anything. Lastly this doesn't change the point that this basically makes sure Google stays in it's pseudo monopoly position. Tbh. independent of privacy this should be shut down by courts handling problematic monopolies.
z77dj3kl 6y ago
There is a whole field (now relatively mainstream) of differential privacy, concerned with answering questions such as "can I be correlated and de-anonymized across queries" (query might be "what's your current cohort id?"). Is FLoC not built on sound principles of differential privacy? That would be a big shame on Google. EDIT: Huge shame on Google! From their FLoC whitepaper: "We want to emphasize that, even though differential privacy is now the de facto privacy notion in industry and academia, we decided against using it as our privacy measure for building audiences." What in the world are they thinking?!
- dp_throw 6y ago
  differential privacy is good for answering population questions like "how many people in my dataset have property x?". it's a lot less clear how to apply it to something as granular as serving personalized ads. and as the example demonstrates, this compounds if you're doing it repeatedly with data that keeps getting updated. to the best of my knowledge, "differentially private personalized ads" is a hard problem, and maybe just a contradiction in terms.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I think it’s Google’s responsibility to make it clear, though, either by putting in the theoretical work to apply differential privacy or proposing a refinement of the concept that allows them to. It’s like those people who propose grand new theories of physics without using any math; if you can’t connect your ideas to what’s come before, people will be rightfully suspicious whether they’re built on quicksand.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Differential privacy is useful for training or updating a public model where individuals' features should be kept private. In floc's case the model is public but isn't being trained on individual's features in realtime, only used for inference as far as the proposal says, e.g. the proof of concept stage will develop a fixed model that all browser instances (of a given vendor) share. Individuals' features are kept private to the extent that the model output can't be effectively reverse-engineered. Differential privacy probably also won't be useful in the POC stage because the training will require accurate labels which defeats privacy.
benlivengood 6y ago
I think floc will be useful because I'll hardcode a very inaccurate cohort in my browser to get amusingly meaningless ads that are as unobtrusive as possible. From what I've seen the most unobtrusive ads are the most expensive methothelioma and personal injury ads since they're generally a short message on a solid color background.
- asquabventured 6y ago
  Best of luck with your mesothelioma that was caused by that asbestos laden boat collision you were involved in!
foobiter 6y ago
targeted advertising is inherently problematic, and anyone trying to sell you a “better” version is trying to fool you
crazypython 6y ago
Ad networks often show us ads we don't want to see, and don't show us ads we want to see. One of the problems I see with is FLoC is that giving the user direct control over their cohort ID.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
This FloC initiative just needs to be shot down hard. It's only meant to allow Google to continue business as usual in the face of privacy regulations. Everything else including privacy is secondary.
yalogin 6y ago
This is really disappointing. They failed to address the very basic privacy requirement given that this billed as privacy tech. Apple tackles this head on when they say the GUID is per app precisely to ensure users cannot be tracked across apps. This tells you where google's priorities are, not that it was in question before, but it just makes it clearer.
dillondoyle 6y ago
one thing i haven't been able to understand?: if each cohort group is so small (relatively i think in the thousands) combine with a UA should be 100% unique? even if cohort is in the millions a UA+ip or geo should be enough to ID, or even add a couple more bits of window.property entropy enough to stay under the 'budget' limit
slt2021 6y ago
Does having uBlock Origin help in being not tracked?
- Valmar 6y ago
  They probably don't cover stuff like this just yet. If it's even possible to block... One of Google's aims has been to make Adblockers useless. Think Manifest V3, which would originally enforce a static filter list with only a few thousand or so entries allowed. uBlock Origin and other actually useful adblockers make heavy use of dynamic filtering lists.
endisneigh 6y ago
I've been pretty much given up on privacy. Not to say that it shouldn't be pursued, but I think more effort should be put into security and stakeholders who are honest and won't abuse your data to begin with. At the end of the day I do not believe a trustless environment is sustainable.
choeger 6y ago
Err, don't you need a unique ID to associate the different cohort IDs in the first place?
- kevingadd 6y ago
  As I understand it, the attack here is that the user in question has an account on site A, and site A is able to share the user's cohort IDs with other websites and this allows the creation of a unique tracking profile across all websites over time
  - choeger 6y ago
    How so? That is really non-obvious to me. If site A associates user X with IDs 1,2, and 3 over three weeks, how does that help site B that only sees the IDs? When B sees ID 3, without any further unique identifier, they won't know that the same device came with ID 1 and 2 beforehand. If site B also had an account and both sites would work together, they could simply compare the email address.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Can we start lobbying for a tracking ban? This only helps big corporations to manipulate consumers and improving techniques of manipulation.
alkonaut 6y ago
Wouldn’t it be much simpler and less invasive to have a system where the browser user chooses a few interests from a fixed set? constituting only a few bits of entropy for ads (I wear men’s clothing and I like ice hockey and cooking) and that’s it? The browser can tell any site this data and it’s a small enough number of bits that I’m not uniquely identifiable even when geography is added.
flixing 6y ago
Well I think each user can only be in a single floc.
kostko 6y ago
Cant we just spam google with random flocIDs?

397 points by Hard_Space 6y ago

Switch browser while you can. Firefox might not be perfect (or even getting slightly worse), but at least it's an alternative and I can easily say it's better than Chromium in most. At least ad blocking worka as it should.

prezjordan 6y ago
I ignored this advice for several years but ~6 months ago switched to Firefox cold turkey and don't miss Chrome one bit. Even when doing web development (I thought I'd miss chrome's CSS/HTML/JS inspector and devtools in general but Firefox's are the same if not better)
- CyberFoxar 6y ago
  I find the dev tools of firefox even better. The ability to see XHR request content/header/responses directly in the Javascript console has been invaluable to me. It annoys me that chrome's console does not have this. You can only see when a request is made, but you have to hop on the network tab to see the actual content.
Semaphor 6y ago
> (or even getting slightly worse) FWIW, it has only been getting better for me
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  Yeah strong agree, apart from the mess up with Firefox on Android. Both at home and work, Firefox desktop (with uBlock Origin) has been a pretty frictionless tool in terms of my browsing experience these past years, across Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.
  - Mudface_72 6y ago
    Try firefox lite , you can get it on uptodown and apkmirror, its is not available in the play store for all regions.
    - Groxx 6y ago
      From a quick glance, this seems to be even further down the "messy" side of the firefox-on-android mess. I.e. its capabilities are even more restricted. Which is not to say it's not useful, and TIL - I didn't know they had released this, so thanks :) But I don't think it particularly applies to this thread.
      - Daho0n 6y ago
        What is the 'messy' problem with Firefox on Android? I have moved those I help with tech to Firefox. My mother for example. They don't know the difference between "the internet" and "Firefox" but so far they run Firefox with UBO with no problems (well not anything new that wasn't there with Chrome too but that is a old people Vs tech problem not unique to Firefox). Anything I need to know?
        Groxx 6y ago
        The messy problem is that you used to be able to run uBO with no problems on Firefox on Android. And most other extensions, with some obvious limitations (e.g. desktop-only UI extensions didn't work, some UIs weren't mobile-friendly, etc). Then they released a preview of a re-design which also broke all extensions. That's arguably fine for a preview, though a bit concerning. Many were raising alarms at this point. Then they released the re-design to the stable release, with still-broken extensions. This pretty unambiguously is "a mess", if not earlier. Then they released built-in support for a couple dozen Mozilla-selected extensions (uBO included, I believe). This is still a mess, and rightfully raises a few eyebrows. ... and we're still there now, after over a year of "this will be fixed soon". I believe you can install nightly + manually tweak config and still install other extensions, but Firefox for Android does not support extensions right now. That's A Problem™, and not a good sign for extension-longevity that it was ever allowed out of preview. It broadly implies extensions are very low on their priority list, which is concerning, as extensions have been the clear leaders on preserving privacy and user control in general. Browsers overwhelmingly follow popular extension behaviors, not the other way around - cripple extensions and you also cripple advancement and experimentation.
waheoo 6y ago
What? I switched a couple years ago, chrome is a mess whenever I'm forced to use it.
eplanit 6y ago
I have noticed a recent decline in the debugging features of FF -- downright buggy. View source shows a form I used 3 pages ago, not the form rendered. I now switch to chrome just for debugging.
- foepys 6y ago
  You don't deserve the downvotes. We are using mainly Firefox at work and sometimes, not often but sometimes, Firefox refuses to load the current file in the debugger. The only solution is to restart Firefox. I get why some are annoyed by this when they are in a debugging session. Although the last time it happened to me was one or two Firefox releases ago. Maybe it got fixed.
  - hosteur 6y ago
    Did you report the problem?
    - foepys 6y ago
      No because I cannot reproduce it. It just happened randomly in the past. As I don't like getting bug reports that boil down to "doesn't work", I don't create them myself.
      - kevingadd 6y ago
        When struggling with a persistent issue like this in FF devtools it can still be worth filing an issue on the bugzilla tracker. Worst case, it gets closed as not reproducible. In practice many of these issues will eventually get caught if enough people complain about them and someone manages to dig through all the reports and come up with theories about the issue. You may get a helpful reply from someone on the team with suggestions on how to troubleshoot it, like enabling specific logging flags or pulling some info out of the console. I've filed lots of bug reports against Firefox in the past and just because you don't have an isolated reproduction case for a devtools issue, that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
  - 6y ago
alert0 6y ago
I switched to Firefox for container tabs a few years ago and love it.
why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
The only thing that keeps me using Chrome from time time is the in-place translation feature. If anything comparable was added to Firefox (which I mainly use), I would be more than happy to get rid of Chrome once and for all. And yes, I'm aware of the extensions that offer similar functionality, but unfortunately they still have some way to go before they can reach parity with Chrome translator.
- fomine3 6y ago
  In-place translating is the feature that really missed on other browsers. Edge also works well with Bing translate. I wish DeepL provides translate extension.
knalum 6y ago
Switched to Brave on mobile. Never looked back. You can see how many mb of data saved due to blocking of trackers.
- Mudface_72 6y ago
  Try firefox lite , get the apk from uptodiwn or apkmirror, because ff lite is region locked in the playstore.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    Dude wtf, not interested in your Watchtower or whatever.
InvOfSmallC 6y ago
Firefox Focus is the best.
bentcorner 6y ago
I stay on Firefox because of UBO and containers, but when I discovered tree-style tabs I'll likely never leave. Edge has an ok-ish implementation of vertical tabs but it still has a ways to go to match tree-style tabs.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  I've been a Tree Style Tab user for many years, but I have to confess I have a complicated relationship with this add-on. I've reached >600 tabs more than once. That's not only a feature.
  - qwertox 6y ago
    I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox. Having three rows of tabs and the ability to scroll them vertically for more tabs was the absolute killer feature for me. I loved Firefox for this. Once Firefox moved to the per-process approach and removed the ability to hack the UI, I saw no more reason to stay on what was a terribly slow browser back then, compared to Chrome. Startup times of 10+ seconds and such shenanigans.
  - petepete 6y ago
    When you have more than (say) twenty, what does having a tab open give you that bookmarking the page doesn't?
    - unicornporn 6y ago
      I do well with Max Tabs set to 60 when researching something. Anything above that is just bad habits.
barbazoo 6y ago
What do I, as an end user, have to do to be protected? Is it sufficient to use Firefox with its default settings? Honestly I don't know and I think I should. I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs installed on Firefox, I'm running pi-hole at home, it's just so much.
- surround 6y ago
  Don't sweat it. All you really need is Firefox + uBlock Origin. And even without uBo, Firefox blocks some trackers by default. Privacy badger is largely useless ever since they got rid of heuristics. ClearURLs is useful, but you'd probably be fine without it. And pi-hole doesn't block anything that uBo doesn't in Firefox (but is still useful for applications outside of the browser). On the other hand, maybe you're like me and want to squeeze as much privacy out of your browser as you can, even if it means breaking some websites. If that's the case, check this website out. Just remember that the tweaks listed here are nice, but not entirely necessary. https://privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config https://privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config
  - barbazoo 6y ago
    Thank you, I'll have a look!
  - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
    With uBO, I would also disable things like Third-Party Cookies. I also have No-Script, but that's mainly for making sites easier to load (Though it does block ad-tracking js-files, like uBO).
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Under Enhanced Tracking Protection, select the Strict option. Firefox also has native HTTPS-only and ESNI features.
prepend 6y ago
I only use Chrome for Google stuff and everything else is split across Brave, Safari, Edge, and Firefox.
55555 6y ago
What's the most frictionless page language translation plugin?
sneak 6y ago
The security sandboxing of Chromium-based browsers is sadly unmatched, however.
julianlam 6y ago
I'm a huge proponent of Firefox on desktop, but the new Firefox on mobile is just awful awful awful. I've switched to Vivaldi and it's just much snappier and doesn't have the papercuts FF mobile is currently struggling through. Total rewrites are cool, but they're real rough around the edges at first.
- Mudface_72 6y ago
  Try firefox lite, get it on uptodown or apkmirror. Its has a region lock an the ppay store.
- Mudface_72 6y ago
  Try firefox lite on android, you can dl the apk on uptodown or apkmirror, its region locked in the playstore.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > I'm a huge proponent of Firefox on desktop, but the new Firefox on mobile is just awful awful awful. I strongly disagree. There are certainly issues, many of which are a result of the recent redesign, but I still find it a much better experience than Chrome on mobile and I think calling it "awful" is hyperbolic. Here are some examples of why I think FF > Chrome on mobile: Firefox mobile supports extensions which I consider necessary at this point, such as uBlock Origin. I can put the address bar at the bottom, where my fingers are. The reader features makes many websites much easier to read - particularly on mobile. Chrome defaults to opening things in tab groups now, which I find to be much more finicky to use than normal tabs. Bookmarks are for saving pages long-term, not tabs.
- vharuck 6y ago
  I'm with you. I preferred the previous version of Firefox on Android. Since switching to the new version: - I've noticed it crashes much more. - It still doesn't support all the extensions I used to have, like uMatrix. - All my bookmarks disappeared when it updated to the new version. I know syncing bookmarks would've let me recover, but I didn't realize it'd happen on the first place. And it seems like an easy problem to Amos even if a user didn't sync.
tinus_hn 6y ago
It’s a fine browser and it is really important to make sure the landscape is not dominated by one engine.
qwertox 6y ago
Please educate me: I am a Chrome user and I do rely on browser syncing my tabs and some passwords. I know that Firefox also has a syncing feature ("Sign into Firefox", "Continue to Firefox Sync"). My problem is that I don't trust Mozilla's ability to keep this data secure. I believe that sooner or later they are going to get hacked, and that data will leak. The same might happen to Google, but I also believe that no other company has the degree of expertise of Google to protect that data. Am I wrong in this assumption? Does Firefox Sync end-to-end encrypt the data, without knowing the key, like Google's Sync Passphrase feature? What are your experiences with Firefox Sync? Does it work just as good as Chrome's, or even better?
- foobiter 6y ago
  why do you trust google to do it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chillydawg 6y ago
  it's encrypted, they store the blob and ship it to any browser that auths correctly. sync works just fine.
- klondike_ 6y ago
  You can actually self host Firefox Sync on your own server if you want.
- DenseComet 6y ago
  I've had a pretty good experience with Firefox Sync, although I don't use it for passwords. Firefox Sync has E2E encryption to ensure that Mozilla doesn't have the ability to view any of your data. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Tl;Dr: Extremely satisfied and using on three devices. The sync server is open source and free, so you can host an instance yourself if you'd like. Firefox accounts have 2FA support, and passwords are end to end synced anyway, so even if your Firefox account is compromised, nobody can recover data without the key. For about a decade in the working, there were zero breaches in mozilla AFAIK. I use Firefox sync in my Windows laptop, Firefox on Android beta. There is also an app called Lockwise that can work as a standalone app and a password fill feature for other apps as well.
theshrike79 6y ago
I use Safari as my primary browser on MacOS, Chrome is only used for the developer mode. Dunno if it's better than the one in Firefox, but it's the one I know =)
sedatk 6y ago
Is FLOC going to be integrated into Chromium or is it just going to be a Chrome feature?
- foobiter 6y ago
  the intention is to make it a web standard, so the end goal is to put it in all browsers
smt1 6y ago
Also consider, for example, Brave. https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/ https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/

vxNsr 6y ago

Kinda sucks for google that within 2 months of them beginning their trial it’s already got a million holes in it. Do you think they keep going bec they don’t actually care about the privacy implications or do you think they try to “legislate” their way out of it by adding something to the EULA of the FLoC program that you can’t share IDs. So they can say “see we don’t allow it” and can pretend no one is gonna do it behind their back.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
That’s how you find holes, by running trials. Remember that this isn’t a privacy regression; they’re trying to find an ad-friendly replacement for third party cookies, which can do cross-site tracking without any need for holes.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  It’s a regression bec they’re taking control away from the users, you can decide to not allow 3rd party cookies, but you can’t opt out of FLoC very easily.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    It's my understanding (source: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/privacy/2021/04/millions-of-chrome-users-quietly-added-to-googles-floc-pilot/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/privacy/2021/04/mil...) that users who opt out of third-party cookies are also opted out of the FLoC trial. I do agree that more granular controls would have been ideal.
xg15 6y ago
I thought FLoC was supposed to become yet another DOM API that any Javascript of any web page you visit can access (if Google got their way). Where would there even be an EULA to sign?
- foobiter 6y ago
  all the data gathered by floc is algorithmically categorized and anonymized by google, they also determine what qualifies as a “protected” content

robin_reala 6y ago

Remember, as a site owner you can choose to stop your website participating in Google’s user tracking by sending this header: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

inetknght 6y ago
So not only do users need to actually opt-out but site owners have to opt-out too? Has anyone stopped to consider where laws and regulations should come in to say that tracking like this is far too invasive?
- robin_reala 6y ago
  You don’t have to, what happens between a user and their browser is theoretically none of your business. But if you care about your users’ privacy, I see no reason not to send this header as there’s no defined value for you as a business (unless you plan to somehow try to retarget users who’ve visited your site based on guessing which cohort that potentially refers to).
- EMM_386 6y ago
  > So not only do users need to actually opt-out but site owners have to opt-out too? By setting this on the site level, your users won't have to opt-out. You are doing it for them (all of them). If you don't, then the browser can always ignore it also. But that would only affect that individual user.
  - mark_and_sweep 6y ago
    Weird question: What if a user actually wants to opt-in but the site has opted-out? Should user opt-in override site opt-out?
    - robin_reala 6y ago
      The user opts in to being placed into a cohort. The site opts out of providing information to Google to let them generate cohorts based on the site. There’s no overlap.

leephillips 6y ago

I think it’s potentially even worse than this. We seem to have to re-learn this lesson periodically: seemingly anonymous data about groups of people does confer the ability to identify individuals: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/anonymous-data-might-not-be-so-anonymous-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/anonymous-data-might-not-be-...

EGreg 6y ago
Basically, take it to its logical conclusion Privacy is dead. Once they have ubiquitous cameras everywhere, and connect the databases, the AI can correlate everything you do, and infer who is meeting whom and for what etc. Similarly online. You are going to get deanonymized unless you go to great lengths to change everything about what you do, including not doing anything in real time. More info: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169?p=169 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169?p=169 JK Rowling: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-comput... And the mac daddy: https://news.bitcoin.com/a-look-at-stylometry-can-we-uncover-satoshi-through-literary-quirks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/a-look-at-stylometry-can-we-uncover...
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s still possible to be anonymous online, most people simply are unwilling to make any tradeoffs for privacy.
  - adamiscool8 6y ago
    Is it possible to be anonymous online and still engage in the "online world" as most non-tech folks see it? Increasingly I think the answer is no, without substantial tradeoffs.
    - Retric 6y ago
      It comes down to what you want in terms of anonymity. You can’t anonymously order food from an app and have it sent to your house while posting your wedding photos on Facebook. But, if you want to anonymously browse the web and talk to people on HN then that’s still possible.

ghughes 6y ago

ICYMI, this analysis is written by the principal engineer behind Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari. John knows what he’s talking about.

float4 6y ago
ICYMI: In Case You Missed It
brnt 6y ago
Never thought I'd ask for this, but I wish Safari was available on Linux.
- julianlam 6y ago
  Well, it is! Just not the version you're hoping to use.
- crazypython 6y ago
  I hear the performance and memory usage of WebKitGTK is much worse than WebKit on macOS.
  - brnt 6y ago
    You mean Midori (AFAIK the only browser using WebKit outside of Safari)?
    - SubzeroCarnage 6y ago
      Midori has been overhauled and is Electron based now. old [0] new [1] See also this extensive list of browsers [2]. [0] https://github.com/midori-browser/core https://github.com/midori-browser/core [1] https://gitlab.com/midori-web/midori-desktop https://gitlab.com/midori-web/midori-desktop [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Web_browsers#WebKit-based https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Web_browsers#WebKit-bas...
      - 6y ago

jonnycomputer 6y ago

Yesterday a video conferencing web application (that I had to use) refused to work with Firefox, saying that it did not meet minimum requirements, and that I needed to use Chrome or Safari instead. I'm curious whether there is an actual technical justification.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
Get a user agent spoofer and find out. The answer's usually no.
- eternalban 6y ago
  TIL. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...
_flux 6y ago
There could actually be technical reasons behind it, for example Jitsi had this bug open for quite a while: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 referring a few Firefox bugs - apparently mostly fixed by updates to Firefox; perhaps the vendors of your the web app you used didn't get the news yet.

twobitshifter 6y ago

Google must have seen this coming. It was never going to be the privacy savior Google billed it as, so why push forward with the concept? We have to look deeper to understand what value FLOC provides to Google. They can exclusively gather tracking info through the browser they control, and they can weaken competitor’s privacy arguments by claiming that they do not track individuals.

Vespasian 6y ago
Probably because they feel that the tide is turning against 3rd-party cookies and maybe even fear legislative action in some markets. The beauty is that Googles business works just fine with FLOC and their competitors don't. When third party trackers "abuse" the ids one "obvious" solution could be to only allow "trusted" advertisers to receive it. If, in a great stroke of fortune, the requirements to become trusted are basically "be Google" I wouldn't be surprised.
- 015a 6y ago
  The worst part is actually, it will never look like "just be Google", because that would be too obviously evil and be subject to decisive legislative action. Google's Widevine (streaming media DRM) is a great correlate to this. If you wanted to try and create a great, novel 4th web engine/browser; good luck. Many of the major streaming sites use Widevine. You can't build a browser to stream that content without asking for access to Widevine encryption. Google will not give it to you; they may, eventually, if you build up enough of a userbase, but what browser would be able to build up that userbase without access to streaming media? Its less about building a bulwark around Google's technology, a clear monopoly, and moreso a bulwark around the Boys Club of Established Big Tech. Then Google can go to Congress and say "we have competition, look, Facebook serves ads".
  - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
    Also we have to ask the question: does DRM like Widevine even work? One could just take a video recording of their Netflix stream using OBS or something similar, and Widevine can't even do anything to counter it.

pfortuny 6y ago

Well-known since the netflix prize challenge: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265973077_Robust_De-anonymization_of_Large_Datasets_How_to_Break_Anonymity_of_the_Netflix_Prize_Dataset https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265973077_Robust_De...

est 6y ago

What am I looking at? https://wicg.io/ https://wicg.io/ Jesus christ what a mess. This web browsing looks like navigating across a minefield.

EMM_386 6y ago

Note the suggestion they are looking into, making sites "sticky": https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7628fca2da8ace8d3 https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7... Although the follow-up comment summarizes why this probably won't work https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7628fca2da8ace8d3 https://github.com/WICG/floc/commit/d822a35f4bfe7d5003fda4a7...

Taek 6y ago

I call it the privacy doom principle. Any information which separates you into a subset of a larger group can eventually be compounded to fully break your anonymity. I did a lot of work on privacy coins, and the power of statistics is staggering. Doesn't matter if you shield yourself by grouping with 100,000 people per transaction, if your anonymity set isn't _everyone_, eventually you can be singly identified. Same goes for browsers, tracking, and "anonymized data".

prepend 6y ago
Especially if you can belong to multiple 100,000 people groups. It doesn’t take very many until you can find an individual by looking at the intersections.
ComodoHacker 6y ago
So can privacy coins scale or all the efforts put there were futile?
- Taek 6y ago
  Privacy coins can work if you can maintain the property that _every_ transaction could plausibly be spending _any_ historic output. For the most part, that's just Zcash-like coins
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    What about Monero?
    - Taek 6y ago
      Monero fails the privacy doom principle, eventually analytics will be enough to fully break it. In the long term, it's not really any safer than bitcoin.
      - matheusmoreira 6y ago

throwaway189262 6y ago

Google's FLOC has an unfixable problem. As soon as other advertisers create their own FLOC's, anonymity goes away. No matter how careful Google is to make sure these ID's aren't unique, as soon as users have several FLOC identifiers, maybe even two, they're uniquely identifiable. Behavioral tracking needs to die. It was a mistake created from lack of web security in the early days, nothing more. It's a bug, not a feature. Google is finally showing us what Chrome was meant to be. A browser monopoly to defend Google's user tracking interests.

jqpabc123 6y ago
Privacy invasion and tracking is built into everything Google does. It's part of their DNA. No real need to look for details, if their name is on it, you know it's in there somewhere.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Making money off of you is their DNA; how they do it can change, and if they could make the same money or more (long-term) without actually storing advertising profiles, you bet they would.
  - jqpabc123 6y ago
    I'll bet that if they had some other way to make just as much as they do now, they would still store your profile and use it to make even more. In other words, the only way they will ever give up privacy invasion is if it is no longer profitable. That's kinda evil don't you think?
ComodoHacker 6y ago
The browser provides FLOC IDs. How do you think other advertisers convince browser vendors (and particularly Google) to include support for their FLOC's?
- throwaway189262 6y ago

dathinab 6y ago

Not really surprising just think about following: Cohorts are sized at "a few thousands" (what does that even mean?). There is a lot a heuristic information retrievable using JS. This is separate from the information Cohorts use to group you. Put both together and you have something quite close to a unique id. There is absolutely no way to fix this problem while having cohort id's and not having very very large cohorts. Which I can't see google using. Just as an example, I have a unusual setup so `coveryourtracks.eff.org` reports that my fingerprint is unique in the 292,340 tested in the last 45 days from heuristics alone. Thinks are not that bad for the average windows or mac user (me: Linux, Firefox, 1440p screen, etc. I'm not surprised tbh.). Still combined that "not so bad" with a FLoC Id and you are back at basically unequally identifiable. EDIT: Btw. there IS a fix, instead of letting advertisers decide on the ad based on you FLoC Id you let your Browser decide based an "available ad topic channels" (if combined with a fixed set of lables and a few other thinks, it's not trivial).

thomasahle 6y ago
Google's proposed solution to this is an "entropy budget". If you have already asked about other JS things that can be used for identification, you won't get a floc id.
- dathinab 6y ago
  I can't imagine this working out tbh. You could always ask first for a FLoC Id and then ask for the JS things, it's a dynamic language and there are always corss-domain redirects with tracing in url Id's. Also some of them are very fundamental parts which are not at all thinks "you need to ask for". Like Chromium is a serve offender when it comes to accidentally providing unnecessary identifiable information. E.g. my Chromium user agent string is more identifiable then the Firefox one, the canvas fingerprints are way worse. There are additional attack vectors like list of plugins, some with names containing way to much information. Also just combining things like Language + TimeZone + User Agent are probably enough to narrow down a FLoC group from multiple thousand to just a view hundred or even less users if you are not in the US/China/India. (Or if you limit yourself to HTTP headers: user agent header + accept lang header + accept header + accept encoding header). Also don't forget you have a fixed Ip address as long as you don't to VPN perma-bouncing. IMHO all the "fixes" are trying to fix a massive hole with a few thin sheets of paper, i.e. at best it will look fixed, for a short moment. But it's not fixing anything. Lastly this doesn't change the point that this basically makes sure Google stays in it's pseudo monopoly position. Tbh. independent of privacy this should be shut down by courts handling problematic monopolies.

z77dj3kl 6y ago

There is a whole field (now relatively mainstream) of differential privacy, concerned with answering questions such as "can I be correlated and de-anonymized across queries" (query might be "what's your current cohort id?"). Is FLoC not built on sound principles of differential privacy? That would be a big shame on Google. EDIT: Huge shame on Google! From their FLoC whitepaper: "We want to emphasize that, even though differential privacy is now the de facto privacy notion in industry and academia, we decided against using it as our privacy measure for building audiences." What in the world are they thinking?!

dp_throw 6y ago
differential privacy is good for answering population questions like "how many people in my dataset have property x?". it's a lot less clear how to apply it to something as granular as serving personalized ads. and as the example demonstrates, this compounds if you're doing it repeatedly with data that keeps getting updated. to the best of my knowledge, "differentially private personalized ads" is a hard problem, and maybe just a contradiction in terms.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I think it’s Google’s responsibility to make it clear, though, either by putting in the theoretical work to apply differential privacy or proposing a refinement of the concept that allows them to. It’s like those people who propose grand new theories of physics without using any math; if you can’t connect your ideas to what’s come before, people will be rightfully suspicious whether they’re built on quicksand.
benlivengood 6y ago
Differential privacy is useful for training or updating a public model where individuals' features should be kept private. In floc's case the model is public but isn't being trained on individual's features in realtime, only used for inference as far as the proposal says, e.g. the proof of concept stage will develop a fixed model that all browser instances (of a given vendor) share. Individuals' features are kept private to the extent that the model output can't be effectively reverse-engineered. Differential privacy probably also won't be useful in the POC stage because the training will require accurate labels which defeats privacy.

benlivengood 6y ago

I think floc will be useful because I'll hardcode a very inaccurate cohort in my browser to get amusingly meaningless ads that are as unobtrusive as possible. From what I've seen the most unobtrusive ads are the most expensive methothelioma and personal injury ads since they're generally a short message on a solid color background.

asquabventured 6y ago
Best of luck with your mesothelioma that was caused by that asbestos laden boat collision you were involved in!

foobiter 6y ago

targeted advertising is inherently problematic, and anyone trying to sell you a “better” version is trying to fool you

crazypython 6y ago

Ad networks often show us ads we don't want to see, and don't show us ads we want to see. One of the problems I see with is FLoC is that giving the user direct control over their cohort ID.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

This FloC initiative just needs to be shot down hard. It's only meant to allow Google to continue business as usual in the face of privacy regulations. Everything else including privacy is secondary.

yalogin 6y ago

This is really disappointing. They failed to address the very basic privacy requirement given that this billed as privacy tech. Apple tackles this head on when they say the GUID is per app precisely to ensure users cannot be tracked across apps. This tells you where google's priorities are, not that it was in question before, but it just makes it clearer.

dillondoyle 6y ago

one thing i haven't been able to understand?: if each cohort group is so small (relatively i think in the thousands) combine with a UA should be 100% unique? even if cohort is in the millions a UA+ip or geo should be enough to ID, or even add a couple more bits of window.property entropy enough to stay under the 'budget' limit

slt2021 6y ago

Does having uBlock Origin help in being not tracked?

Valmar 6y ago
They probably don't cover stuff like this just yet. If it's even possible to block... One of Google's aims has been to make Adblockers useless. Think Manifest V3, which would originally enforce a static filter list with only a few thousand or so entries allowed. uBlock Origin and other actually useful adblockers make heavy use of dynamic filtering lists.

endisneigh 6y ago

I've been pretty much given up on privacy. Not to say that it shouldn't be pursued, but I think more effort should be put into security and stakeholders who are honest and won't abuse your data to begin with. At the end of the day I do not believe a trustless environment is sustainable.

choeger 6y ago

Err, don't you need a unique ID to associate the different cohort IDs in the first place?

kevingadd 6y ago
As I understand it, the attack here is that the user in question has an account on site A, and site A is able to share the user's cohort IDs with other websites and this allows the creation of a unique tracking profile across all websites over time
- choeger 6y ago
  How so? That is really non-obvious to me. If site A associates user X with IDs 1,2, and 3 over three weeks, how does that help site B that only sees the IDs? When B sees ID 3, without any further unique identifier, they won't know that the same device came with ID 1 and 2 beforehand. If site B also had an account and both sites would work together, they could simply compare the email address.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Can we start lobbying for a tracking ban? This only helps big corporations to manipulate consumers and improving techniques of manipulation.

alkonaut 6y ago

Wouldn’t it be much simpler and less invasive to have a system where the browser user chooses a few interests from a fixed set? constituting only a few bits of entropy for ads (I wear men’s clothing and I like ice hockey and cooking) and that’s it? The browser can tell any site this data and it’s a small enough number of bits that I’m not uniquely identifiable even when geography is added.

flixing 6y ago

Well I think each user can only be in a single floc.

kostko 6y ago

Cant we just spam google with random flocIDs?