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I find the visceral reaction against FLoC interesting. On paper it is an improvement over explicit 3rd party tracking cookies that are used to monitor the sites

I find the visceral reaction against FLoC interesting. On paper it is an improvement over explicit 3rd party tracking cookies that are used to monitor the sites you visit and are ultimately used to categorize you. Just something about "we're gonna stamp you with some labels and broadcast them to every site you visit" really provokes people even though the end results are the same as before.

olliej 5y ago
the problem is that people don't like the status quo, and FLOC is advertised as solving that but it doesn't. So it's a new technology, with new complexity, and unknown additional attack surface (in the sense of attacks on user privacy) that doesn't do anything to actually reduce the tracking of users.
- henearkr 5y ago
  The average person will also put ads on their blog to generate revenues.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  The status quo is advertisers tracking every single website you visit, and keeping a personalized profile of you with all your data in there. The system under FLoC means they don't see anything about you and which site you've visited, they only get a single cohort ID, which is group roughly representing your browsing behavior. How are these the same?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Who controls the cohorts? Can membership in the wrong one mean a death sentence in some countries?
    - Mehdi2277 5y ago
      Google does and the cohorts are opaque and data generated based on history. They're not actually using this specific approach but roughly what they're doing is like taking your browser history, representing it as some vector of numbers and then clustering nearby points together and giving each cluster a cohort id. Cohort ids are also updated periodically (roughly weekly). The clusters are most likely to be surface level interests. The id itself doesn't give you that though and you'd want many users with same cohort ids, correlate there behaviors, to try to guess what underlying browse trend it means which is a lot better than the current state of things of effectively having a user id with 3rd party cookie.
      - matthewdgreen 5y ago
        It seems to me that decoding FLoC IDs will be a big business, given their value. So people will do their best to reverse the system and keep an up-to-date table for at least some of the more valuable/interesting cohort IDs, if not all of them. In the worst case you can do this just by paying volunteers with known interests and recording their FLoC IDs. Presumably that will be done enough that at least some of the data is available for sale. My further understanding is that FLoC IDs will be available to any website. So even if you’re too small to run a global tracking network, you can grab the FLoC ID from any visitor and, assuming that decoding services exist, turn that into useful data instantly.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    The status quo is advertisers use every fingerprinting technique at their disposal. The system under FLoC is advertisers use every fingerprinting technique at their disposal including the FLoC header. 3rd party cookies aren't part of the status quo. Safari and Firefox block them already.
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      FLoC by itself doesn't solve fingerprinting, the but larger Privacy Sandbox effort does have changes such as Privacy Budget which aim to fix fingerprinting.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        The changes that improve privacy don't depend on FLoC.
pseudalopex 5y ago
Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  3rd party cookies will be removed from most browsers, including Chrome, by next year .
Nicksil 5y ago
I think some of what you're seeing is that any of this kind of stuff exists at all. That any level of monitoring and tracking behavior exists without clear and explicit permission from the human/agent; The attempts at making this behavior the status quo and "just how things are" when in fact it is not; The gaslighting with threats of the Internet itself going away if we don't cede to the advertisers; the scolding those opposed as freeloading, small-business haters, as if ads are the only source of remuneration left to exist. It's that sort of stuff that fuels some of the more pronounced objections, I suspect. It's what fuels mine. Edit: I'm still bad at HN formatting.
matthewmorgan 5y ago
Part of this must be related to the name, which I find obnoxious for some reason
ehsankia 5y ago
> the end results are the same as before Except it's not. In the old world, advertisers literally track you around the web and gather data about every single website you've visited, how long you've spent there, and so on. In the new world, they basically just get an anonymized "group" you belong to that roughly gives them what you're interested in. They wouldn't know who you are or anything else about you, just that your in group 8123 and that group happens to generally visit a lot of websites related to fishing.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies already. And advertisers won't stop using other fingerprinting techniques just because FLoC exists.
- ogre_codes 5y ago
  Old: Google collected data, kept it on their servers, and sold advertising against that data. They don't ask permission, they don't let you black out categories you don't want to see advertising against. Nor do they (effectively) prevent malicious actors from using that advertising to sell content to manipulate people. Now: Exactly the same, only Google uses your hard drive to store the data. There are some privacy issues addressed by this, but it doesn't address many of the issues with personalized targeting. It's neat when you are talking about things like fishing, but targeted advertising has also been used in multiple countries to manipulate elections by outside governments. It's also been used to out gay people and racist marketing.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    If your problem is targeted advertising, then yes, this definitely isn't trying to solve that. The goal here is to solve your data being leaked all over the internet. We can have an entirely separate discussion on whether the value of targeted ads. You named a few downside but are completely ignoring the upsides. The fact that without them, anyone other than large corporations would be entirely cut out of advertising their product. Any small business or creator with a niche demographic is basically screwed. If you make an app for some video game, a cure for some specific disease, gear for a specific sport, all those people would basically be locked out of advertising their products.
onion2k 5y ago
FLoC is better tracking in a world where many people don't want to be tracked.
- jonas21 5y ago
  Or, in other words, perfect is the enemy of good?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    FLoC only has benefits compared to 3rd party cookies. But other browsers block 3rd party cookies already.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    We're talking about the mass erosion of privacy in order to tell whether to show someone an advert for fishing rods rather than PlayStation based on more than the content of the page they're viewing right now. Maybe perfect is actually achievable here. It is, after all, 'simply' a mechanism by which people can genuinely opt out of tracking that tech companies abide by. Why is that so hard that we give up and accept tech companies ignoring people's freedom and liberty to choose not to be tracked?
mro_name 5y ago
are 3rd parties legit? IMO not. I block them by default and whitelist in case.
jqpabc123 5y ago
You contradict yourself. It's not any "improvement" if the results are the same as before. The user realizes no "improvement" here at all. The bottom line is that 3rd party cookies were being successfully blocked --- and for good reasons --- so Google built a workaround --- which is now being blocked too. The apparent plan being that most users are clueless lemmings who will continue to use Google Chrome --- for no good reason. Stupidity gets exploited --- a universal law of commerce.
moneytide1 5y ago
> the visceral reaction against FLoC The article title contains the word "everybody" which is evidence of the authors tendency to deal in absolutes. He is claiming to speak for us all with this loose assimilation of words ("hates" further describes an emotional disposition towards idea proposal, and the tagline is equally charming). Let's make it our mission to be polite for a cleaner archive of Internet Interaction Instances. I will not match the negative energy and instead proceed to be cordial&calculated in the delivery of my opinion (I lost sleep over this last night). Thiel on Weinstein's "Portal" ventured the "eye of Sauron" metaphor [0] to describe the effect of surveillance on generations developing during the Information Age. The "double-slit experiment" is also relevant here (modern scientific lore suggesting that the act of observation influences outcome - "spooky action"). Tolkien and Wagner both constructed epic "entertainment" sagas that describe elaborate human feud because of a "golden ring of power". Both of these works were written after the Industrial Age had fully (quickly) propelled civilization into a new form, with recent regional warfare fresh in the memories of the aforementioned authors (Wagner would have monitored Franco-Prussian conflict, Tolkien personally participated in the Somme). The Völsunga saga could be considered the first instance of the same story ("... the ring Andvaranaut serves as a connection and explanation for the characters' troubles." [1] Fafnir turning into a dragon to protect the gold is just a metaphor for the military prowess of an organized fiefdom). Gold exchanging hands to influence the toil of entire populations goes back as far as Egyptian recognition of its malleability, ease of extraction, and resemblance to the Sun. With Tolkien's childhood propensity for secrecy, enthusiasm for cryptoanalysis, and concern of the postal censorship of his wartime subordinates - it makes sense that he would associate a gold object with "invisibility", that is, anonymity. The "eye of Sauron" will only notice you if you've revealed your desire to move undetected among the ones that operate in your shared civilization. This results in the curse of a painfully long life and a corruption of an isolated mind (Gollum). Your enemy then becomes the people (Nazgul) who have already succumbed to this lust for amplification of their might because of the same "magical" inanimate object. Marvel's Thanos ring-adorned-gauntlet is the recently installed update of the same concept. What does this have to do with the Federated Learning of Cohorts? A single search request "cost" 7-10 grams of carbon emission in 2009 [2]. Running your computer or progressively chewing up the limited battery lifetime of your smartphone to locate something on the internet for "free" costs carbon output at some point in a transmission pathway. Soft/hardware engineers will reduce this footprint over time through clever organization of their employers' assets, but nothing is "free". You owe it to society to have your anonymized meta-interests understood&catalogued by the hand that feeds you a conveniently "free" Ranked Page of relevant information (digitally posted efforts of others automatically crawled). The pinnacle of modern technology is in your pocket (at a cost reduced on purpose so everyone can input their thoughts) - but you don't want to share your self with the world? A flock of various cohorts feeding the hive-mind with their intent is supposed to be valuable because this information can eventually generate paychecks and subsidies meant to satisfy the flock's apparent needs (or guide it away from corrosive wants). Regulated Money flow (not gold, aka invisibility) is meant to be documented so that a society can sort itself out. Perhaps you are resisting FLoC because of distrust in who is pulling the levers? If your paranoia is valid, then the problem will be naturally solved by internal resolution ("Et tu, Brute?"). I am a node in the hive-mind with a duty to transmit new information as soon as it is discovered. Even if it's wrong - at least I said something. I am an open book and entertainer of an open source society. "I don't care that they stole my idea... I care that they don't have any of their own." - Nikola Tesla [0] https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s?t=9870 https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s?t=9870 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga [2] https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprint-of-a-google-search-16105 https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprin...

olliej 5y ago

the problem is that people don't like the status quo, and FLOC is advertised as solving that but it doesn't. So it's a new technology, with new complexity, and unknown additional attack surface (in the sense of attacks on user privacy) that doesn't do anything to actually reduce the tracking of users.

henearkr 5y ago
The average person will also put ads on their blog to generate revenues.
ehsankia 5y ago
The status quo is advertisers tracking every single website you visit, and keeping a personalized profile of you with all your data in there. The system under FLoC means they don't see anything about you and which site you've visited, they only get a single cohort ID, which is group roughly representing your browsing behavior. How are these the same?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Who controls the cohorts? Can membership in the wrong one mean a death sentence in some countries?
  - Mehdi2277 5y ago
    Google does and the cohorts are opaque and data generated based on history. They're not actually using this specific approach but roughly what they're doing is like taking your browser history, representing it as some vector of numbers and then clustering nearby points together and giving each cluster a cohort id. Cohort ids are also updated periodically (roughly weekly). The clusters are most likely to be surface level interests. The id itself doesn't give you that though and you'd want many users with same cohort ids, correlate there behaviors, to try to guess what underlying browse trend it means which is a lot better than the current state of things of effectively having a user id with 3rd party cookie.
    - matthewdgreen 5y ago
      It seems to me that decoding FLoC IDs will be a big business, given their value. So people will do their best to reverse the system and keep an up-to-date table for at least some of the more valuable/interesting cohort IDs, if not all of them. In the worst case you can do this just by paying volunteers with known interests and recording their FLoC IDs. Presumably that will be done enough that at least some of the data is available for sale. My further understanding is that FLoC IDs will be available to any website. So even if you’re too small to run a global tracking network, you can grab the FLoC ID from any visitor and, assuming that decoding services exist, turn that into useful data instantly.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The status quo is advertisers use every fingerprinting technique at their disposal. The system under FLoC is advertisers use every fingerprinting technique at their disposal including the FLoC header. 3rd party cookies aren't part of the status quo. Safari and Firefox block them already.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    FLoC by itself doesn't solve fingerprinting, the but larger Privacy Sandbox effort does have changes such as Privacy Budget which aim to fix fingerprinting.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      The changes that improve privacy don't depend on FLoC.

pseudalopex 5y ago

Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies.

noahtallen 5y ago
3rd party cookies will be removed from most browsers, including Chrome, by next year .

Nicksil 5y ago

I think some of what you're seeing is that any of this kind of stuff exists at all. That any level of monitoring and tracking behavior exists without clear and explicit permission from the human/agent; The attempts at making this behavior the status quo and "just how things are" when in fact it is not; The gaslighting with threats of the Internet itself going away if we don't cede to the advertisers; the scolding those opposed as freeloading, small-business haters, as if ads are the only source of remuneration left to exist. It's that sort of stuff that fuels some of the more pronounced objections, I suspect. It's what fuels mine. Edit: I'm still bad at HN formatting.

matthewmorgan 5y ago

Part of this must be related to the name, which I find obnoxious for some reason

ehsankia 5y ago

> the end results are the same as before Except it's not. In the old world, advertisers literally track you around the web and gather data about every single website you've visited, how long you've spent there, and so on. In the new world, they basically just get an anonymized "group" you belong to that roughly gives them what you're interested in. They wouldn't know who you are or anything else about you, just that your in group 8123 and that group happens to generally visit a lot of websites related to fishing.

pseudalopex 5y ago
Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies already. And advertisers won't stop using other fingerprinting techniques just because FLoC exists.
ogre_codes 5y ago
Old: Google collected data, kept it on their servers, and sold advertising against that data. They don't ask permission, they don't let you black out categories you don't want to see advertising against. Nor do they (effectively) prevent malicious actors from using that advertising to sell content to manipulate people. Now: Exactly the same, only Google uses your hard drive to store the data. There are some privacy issues addressed by this, but it doesn't address many of the issues with personalized targeting. It's neat when you are talking about things like fishing, but targeted advertising has also been used in multiple countries to manipulate elections by outside governments. It's also been used to out gay people and racist marketing.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  If your problem is targeted advertising, then yes, this definitely isn't trying to solve that. The goal here is to solve your data being leaked all over the internet. We can have an entirely separate discussion on whether the value of targeted ads. You named a few downside but are completely ignoring the upsides. The fact that without them, anyone other than large corporations would be entirely cut out of advertising their product. Any small business or creator with a niche demographic is basically screwed. If you make an app for some video game, a cure for some specific disease, gear for a specific sport, all those people would basically be locked out of advertising their products.

onion2k 5y ago

FLoC is better tracking in a world where many people don't want to be tracked.

jonas21 5y ago
Or, in other words, perfect is the enemy of good?
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  FLoC only has benefits compared to 3rd party cookies. But other browsers block 3rd party cookies already.
- onion2k 5y ago
  We're talking about the mass erosion of privacy in order to tell whether to show someone an advert for fishing rods rather than PlayStation based on more than the content of the page they're viewing right now. Maybe perfect is actually achievable here. It is, after all, 'simply' a mechanism by which people can genuinely opt out of tracking that tech companies abide by. Why is that so hard that we give up and accept tech companies ignoring people's freedom and liberty to choose not to be tracked?

mro_name 5y ago

are 3rd parties legit? IMO not. I block them by default and whitelist in case.

jqpabc123 5y ago

You contradict yourself. It's not any "improvement" if the results are the same as before. The user realizes no "improvement" here at all. The bottom line is that 3rd party cookies were being successfully blocked --- and for good reasons --- so Google built a workaround --- which is now being blocked too. The apparent plan being that most users are clueless lemmings who will continue to use Google Chrome --- for no good reason. Stupidity gets exploited --- a universal law of commerce.

moneytide1 5y ago

> the visceral reaction against FLoC The article title contains the word "everybody" which is evidence of the authors tendency to deal in absolutes. He is claiming to speak for us all with this loose assimilation of words ("hates" further describes an emotional disposition towards idea proposal, and the tagline is equally charming). Let's make it our mission to be polite for a cleaner archive of Internet Interaction Instances. I will not match the negative energy and instead proceed to be cordial&calculated in the delivery of my opinion (I lost sleep over this last night). Thiel on Weinstein's "Portal" ventured the "eye of Sauron" metaphor [0] to describe the effect of surveillance on generations developing during the Information Age. The "double-slit experiment" is also relevant here (modern scientific lore suggesting that the act of observation influences outcome - "spooky action"). Tolkien and Wagner both constructed epic "entertainment" sagas that describe elaborate human feud because of a "golden ring of power". Both of these works were written after the Industrial Age had fully (quickly) propelled civilization into a new form, with recent regional warfare fresh in the memories of the aforementioned authors (Wagner would have monitored Franco-Prussian conflict, Tolkien personally participated in the Somme). The Völsunga saga could be considered the first instance of the same story ("... the ring Andvaranaut serves as a connection and explanation for the characters' troubles." [1] Fafnir turning into a dragon to protect the gold is just a metaphor for the military prowess of an organized fiefdom). Gold exchanging hands to influence the toil of entire populations goes back as far as Egyptian recognition of its malleability, ease of extraction, and resemblance to the Sun. With Tolkien's childhood propensity for secrecy, enthusiasm for cryptoanalysis, and concern of the postal censorship of his wartime subordinates - it makes sense that he would associate a gold object with "invisibility", that is, anonymity. The "eye of Sauron" will only notice you if you've revealed your desire to move undetected among the ones that operate in your shared civilization. This results in the curse of a painfully long life and a corruption of an isolated mind (Gollum). Your enemy then becomes the people (Nazgul) who have already succumbed to this lust for amplification of their might because of the same "magical" inanimate object. Marvel's Thanos ring-adorned-gauntlet is the recently installed update of the same concept. What does this have to do with the Federated Learning of Cohorts? A single search request "cost" 7-10 grams of carbon emission in 2009 [2]. Running your computer or progressively chewing up the limited battery lifetime of your smartphone to locate something on the internet for "free" costs carbon output at some point in a transmission pathway. Soft/hardware engineers will reduce this footprint over time through clever organization of their employers' assets, but nothing is "free". You owe it to society to have your anonymized meta-interests understood&catalogued by the hand that feeds you a conveniently "free" Ranked Page of relevant information (digitally posted efforts of others automatically crawled). The pinnacle of modern technology is in your pocket (at a cost reduced on purpose so everyone can input their thoughts) - but you don't want to share your self with the world? A flock of various cohorts feeding the hive-mind with their intent is supposed to be valuable because this information can eventually generate paychecks and subsidies meant to satisfy the flock's apparent needs (or guide it away from corrosive wants). Regulated Money flow (not gold, aka invisibility) is meant to be documented so that a society can sort itself out. Perhaps you are resisting FLoC because of distrust in who is pulling the levers? If your paranoia is valid, then the problem will be naturally solved by internal resolution ("Et tu, Brute?"). I am a node in the hive-mind with a duty to transmit new information as soon as it is discovered. Even if it's wrong - at least I said something. I am an open book and entertainer of an open source society. "I don't care that they stole my idea... I care that they don't have any of their own." - Nikola Tesla [0] https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s?t=9870 https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s?t=9870 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga [2] https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprint-of-a-google-search-16105 https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprin...