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The intro lost me: > WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web – and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimi

by toomim 6y ago

The intro lost me: > WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web – and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code:" function disable_floc($headers) { $headers['Permissions-Policy'] = 'interest-cohort=()'; return $headers; } add_filter('wp_headers', 'disable_floc'); If you seriously think this is going to make a difference in racism, of all things... I mean... do people seriously think that? Do you know what racism is anymore?

notatoad 6y ago
I mean I'd be willing to listen to an argument that FLoC will contribute to systemic racism. I accept that it's plausible. But it really makes me distrustful of the whole proposal when people make wild claims like that and don't feel like they need to make even the briefest attempt to back it up. It seems a lot more like they're just taking the currently trending social cause and co-opting it to support their own unrelated agenda.
kevingadd 6y ago
FLoC exists to group users down into behavioral targeting categories, it should be obvious that some of those will end up corresponding to gender or race or other traits that are protected statuses. We've repeatedly had incidents where big companies were caught accidentally letting (for example) landlords filter advertisements by race or recruiters filter listings by age, both of which are illegal.
- dstaley 6y ago
  Yup, from the linked EFF article: > Observers may learn that in general, members of a specific cohort are substantially likely to be a specific type of person. For example, a particular cohort may over-represent users who are young, female, and Black; another cohort, middle-aged Republican voters; a third, LGBTQ+ youth. This means every site you visit will have a good idea about what kind of person you are on first contact, without having to do the work of tracking you across the web.
  - Closi 6y ago
    To further back up the post - we have previously seen targeted advertisement used specifically to disenfranchise black voters, so there is definitely precedent.
- amarant 6y ago
  FLoC is replacing cookies, that were already used in pretty much the exact same manner. I can't say I think FLoC is a win for consumers, but how it will promote racism any more than cookies is beyond me. I could be wrong of course, if so, please explain how.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Because cohorts are stronger than cookies for sites that aren’t tracking you across the web and correlating that data.
- dqpb 6y ago
  Does race determine behavior?
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into extraneous flamewar. This is in the site guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Cherry-picking a detail you find most provocative in an article and importing it here to express how provoked you feel is a way of setting the thread on fire—no doubt unintentionally [1], besides which the greater part of the problem is caused by the upvotes such things attract—but still, we don't want threads-on-fire. We're trying for something different than that. Readers should leave tangential provocations where they find them, and commenters should comment on what gratifies their intellectual curiosity, as the guidelines ask. Edit: also, please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that cross that line [2], and your account's recent history seems to have crossed it. Fortunately that seems to be a recent development so it should be easy to fix. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- toomim 6y ago
  Ok, these are good points. I would love to have less politics involved in my tech discussions and will adjust my own comments as you suggest. Thanks!
Spivak 6y ago
I think you’re the one that’s operating on a purely old-school definition of systematic discrimination. You’re giving people a signal that by it’s very nature groups people like them together and naturally will have a correlation to their age, gender, race, wealth, ability, blah blah. And then you’re told that you’re supposed to use this information to make decisions about them as an individual. How does this not lead to racism? This is the digital equivalent of trying to be “race blind.” You can’t just remove the race column in your db and assume that’s it fine to torture your data for patterns secure that your results won’t correlate to race.
cromwellian 6y ago
It seriously smells like virtue signaling extraordinaire, worse still when corporations do it, because we know it's often for marketing purposes. Did H&M and Nike really care about Xinjiang cotton before people in social media started making a stink about it? A lot of this is reminiscent of the hyperbole over AMP.

by toomim 6y ago

notatoad 6y ago

I mean I'd be willing to listen to an argument that FLoC will contribute to systemic racism. I accept that it's plausible. But it really makes me distrustful of the whole proposal when people make wild claims like that and don't feel like they need to make even the briefest attempt to back it up. It seems a lot more like they're just taking the currently trending social cause and co-opting it to support their own unrelated agenda.

kevingadd 6y ago

FLoC exists to group users down into behavioral targeting categories, it should be obvious that some of those will end up corresponding to gender or race or other traits that are protected statuses. We've repeatedly had incidents where big companies were caught accidentally letting (for example) landlords filter advertisements by race or recruiters filter listings by age, both of which are illegal.

dstaley 6y ago
Yup, from the linked EFF article: > Observers may learn that in general, members of a specific cohort are substantially likely to be a specific type of person. For example, a particular cohort may over-represent users who are young, female, and Black; another cohort, middle-aged Republican voters; a third, LGBTQ+ youth. This means every site you visit will have a good idea about what kind of person you are on first contact, without having to do the work of tracking you across the web.
- Closi 6y ago
  To further back up the post - we have previously seen targeted advertisement used specifically to disenfranchise black voters, so there is definitely precedent.
amarant 6y ago
FLoC is replacing cookies, that were already used in pretty much the exact same manner. I can't say I think FLoC is a win for consumers, but how it will promote racism any more than cookies is beyond me. I could be wrong of course, if so, please explain how.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Because cohorts are stronger than cookies for sites that aren’t tracking you across the web and correlating that data.
dqpb 6y ago
Does race determine behavior?

dang 6y ago

Please don't take HN threads into extraneous flamewar. This is in the site guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Cherry-picking a detail you find most provocative in an article and importing it here to express how provoked you feel is a way of setting the thread on fire—no doubt unintentionally [1], besides which the greater part of the problem is caused by the upvotes such things attract—but still, we don't want threads-on-fire. We're trying for something different than that. Readers should leave tangential provocations where they find them, and commenters should comment on what gratifies their intellectual curiosity, as the guidelines ask. Edit: also, please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that cross that line [2], and your account's recent history seems to have crossed it. Fortunately that seems to be a recent development so it should be easy to fix. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

toomim 6y ago
Ok, these are good points. I would love to have less politics involved in my tech discussions and will adjust my own comments as you suggest. Thanks!

Spivak 6y ago

I think you’re the one that’s operating on a purely old-school definition of systematic discrimination. You’re giving people a signal that by it’s very nature groups people like them together and naturally will have a correlation to their age, gender, race, wealth, ability, blah blah. And then you’re told that you’re supposed to use this information to make decisions about them as an individual. How does this not lead to racism? This is the digital equivalent of trying to be “race blind.” You can’t just remove the race column in your db and assume that’s it fine to torture your data for patterns secure that your results won’t correlate to race.

cromwellian 6y ago

It seriously smells like virtue signaling extraordinaire, worse still when corporations do it, because we know it's often for marketing purposes. Did H&M and Nike really care about Xinjiang cotton before people in social media started making a stink about it? A lot of this is reminiscent of the hyperbole over AMP.