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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

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 6y ago
Who controls the cohorts? Can membership in the wrong one mean a death sentence in some countries?
- Mehdi2277 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    The changes that improve privacy don't depend on FLoC.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Who controls the cohorts? Can membership in the wrong one mean a death sentence in some countries?

Mehdi2277 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  The changes that improve privacy don't depend on FLoC.