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The internet is split roughly into 3. The top 100 websites get a third of the page views, the remaining top 10k get another third and millions of websites get t
by nindalf 6y ago
The internet is split roughly into 3. The top 100 websites get a third of the page views, the remaining top 10k get another third and millions of websites get the last third.
The top 100 have dedicated engineering and policy teams teams that will disable FLoC because they're either not interested in ads (Wikipedia) or have their own first party implementation that doesn't need FLoC (Facebook). They'll ditch FLoC.
The next 10k might have engineering teams that can make the change, but might be more interested in finding out about their audience so they can monetize more easily. They'll keep FLoC.
As for the remaining millions, only a tiny minority of them will even know this is a thing, let alone care enough to make the change or contact a developer who can do it. These are the folks who have hosted their wordpress site with GoDaddy because it was cheap and quick when they needed a site. They'll keep FLoC.
So the upshot is that github.com, instagram.com and amazon.com might opt out, but the vast majority of the web will not. Me prediction is that at least half of all web pages loaded by users won't have this header.
- dmitriid 6y agoCan't remember what article it was, but I remember that Facebook didn't even care about "top companies with top ads". The long tail trumped anything. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same in Google's case. A dozen big-name websites drop FLOC? Who cares, there's a billion more.
- PeterisP 6y agoIMHO it's far more unbalanced than "The top 100 websites get a third of the traffic, the remaining top 10k get another third and millions of websites get the last third." Purely from data traffic, youtube and netflix already get a third of the traffic (and that's just 2, not 100); and purely from pageview perspective, the top social media sites plus major media sites (again, a subset of the top100) get more than half IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if the top 100 websites get 80% of the traffic, the remaining top 10k get 10% and all the millions of other sites get the last 10%.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nindalf 6y agoI meant pageviews, not bandwidth consumed. Streaming websites are always going to dominate the latter. This 100-10k-millions split statistic was pulled from a talk by Ilya Grigorik, who had worked on Web Performance at Google. I'm guessing they based it on data from Chrome.
- aabhay 6y agoSearches and time spent browsing are very different. Google likely doesn’t have visibility over how much time people spend on TikTok. Or perhaps Android collects that data.
- amarant 6y agoUnless you view it in their browser, then they are more than likely to have that visibility. And Chrome is the most popular browser last I checked, so probably a fairly good indication of overall trends can be drawn from such statistics
- account42 6y agoThe header is pointless anyway for the actual purpose of disabling FLoC as Chrome/Google will simply start ignoring it when enough websites add it.
- james_pm 6y agoWordPress may very well block FLoC which cuts off a good chunk, even when you eliminate those that don't update to the latest version. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-floc-as-a-security-concern/ https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-fl...
- onion2k 6y agoThat's probably accurate if you assume every website is equal, but if you measure by traffic the top 100 websites account for 95% of measurable tracking events. Won't that make FLoC rather ineffective if 95% of the data is missing?
- buro9 6y agoCloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and other CDNs should disable FLoC by default for all customers, and provide a toggle to those customers who explicitly wish to enable it. But until they do[1]: Apache: Header always set Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() Caddy: header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()" Cloudflare Workers (not free as there are limits): addEventListener('fetch', event=> { event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request)) }) async function handleRequest(request) { let response=await fetch(request) let newHeaders=new Headers(response.headers) newHeaders.set("Permissions-Policy","interest-cohort=()") return new Response(response.body, { status: response.status, statusText: response.statusText, headers: newHeaders }) } Lighttpd: server.modules +=("mod_setenv") setenv.add-response-header=("Permissions-Policy"=>"interest-cohort=()") Netlify: [[headers]] for="/*" [headers.values] Permissions-Policy="interest-cohort=()" Nginx: add_header Permissions-Policy interest-cohort=(); [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc#opting-out-of-computation https://github.com/WICG/floc#opting-out-of-computation
- woofcat 6y agoThanks, just disabled this on my tiny near zero traffic sites. Hopefully if enough people disable it, it will become useless.
- _flux 6y agoYes, it will become useless. The header that is..
- WorldMaker 6y agoGoogle already has shown bad faith in opt-out headers like this when they immediately started ignoring Do-Not-Track as soon as non-Chrome browsers made it a default. The fact that the spec for this awful project uses an opt-out instead of an opt-in header seems a pretty clear signal to me that Google may not have any intention of following it in the long run.
- theideaofcoffee 6y ago
- tyingq 6y agoThere may also be some uplift from various frameworks, CRMs, CDNs, etc, if any of them decide to make it the default.
- akie 6y agoAccording to their own numbers, WordPress accounts for 41% of the total number of websites, and they're considering switching off FLoC by default (https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53069 https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53069 - discussion not settled yet though).
- jefftk 6y ago> will disable FLoC because they're either not interested in ads (Wikipedia) Wikipedia does not need to take any action to disable FLoC; it's only active if the site opts in, on a per-pageview basis: * If you call document.interestCohort() to get a FLoC id for a user, that pageview will be included in FLoC calculation. * For the origin trial, to deal with the chicken-and-egg problem, a pageview is included you load ads (determined with EasyList) See https://web.dev/floc/ https://web.dev/floc/ (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- detaro 6y agoEasyList is extremely broad, changes frequently, and e.g. has included communities having banners for community events as ads, and Google appears to give zero promises on the stability of this. So relying on this requires continuous monitoring that Chrome doesn't randomly decide to tag something on some page as an ad, which is doing even more work just to cater to Google whims. Just blocking it is the sane choice here. since you say it is about "chicken-and-egg problem" during the trial: is there a clear commitment somewhere that Google plans to not include pages that do not use the FLoC API in the future?
- jefftk 6y ago> is there a clear commitment somewhere that Google plans to not include pages that do not use the FLoC API in the future? Not something as clear as I'd like. The closest I see is: A page visit will be included in the browser's FLoC calculation if document.interestCohort() is used on the page. During the current FLoC origin trial, a page will also be included in the calculation if Chrome detects that the page loads ads or ads-related resources. -- https://web.dev/floc/#do-websites-have-to-participate-and-share-information https://web.dev/floc/#do-websites-have-to-participate-and-sh...
- falcolas 6y agoSo, every page with ads (as determined by an opaque and ever-changing method in a closed source browser), will be included while computing the cohort. Got it. It seems safest to assume that "it happens on every page" since so much of the internet is monetized with ads. Please forgive us for not trusting Google's "we pinky swear it will change". We have no real reason to trust that Google will keep their word.
- fps_doug 6y agoIt's kinda sad that you can't just run a web server and host your own homepage anymore. You need to mess with your webserver config to make it spam the client with a dozen HTTP headers to disable FLoC, enable HSTS, set this weird same site origin policy thing, disallow iframe embedding... Luckily enough someone had the idea to make it so HTTP headers will be compressed too, so we can add some more before the request header completely fills up the initial RWIN of the server.
- aembleton 6y agoStrange, I'm able to run my own webserver without worrying about any of that. Just a default deploy of Nginx. Disable FLoC if you want, but Google could always change it in future and ignore the header.
- watermelon0 6y agoI think that parent meant that default should be the most secure and least privacy invading, and allow people to explicitly soften the restrictions.
- coldpie 6y agoYou don't have to do any of that. If the user wants to use a browser that sends all of their private data to Google, it's not my job to stop them.
- colllectorof 6y ago>As for the remaining millions, only a tiny minority of them will even know this is a thing, let alone care enough to make the change or contact a developer who can do it. These are the folks who have hosted their wordpress site with GoDaddy because it was cheap and quick when they needed a site. One company decides to do something stupid and you expect millions of website owners to scurry and add junk to their headers to create a "mitigation"? This is nuts. This is a browser problem, not a website problem.
- eCa 6y agoTheir point was that that won’t happen. Unfortunately, the other solution is to get billions of people to stop using a trojan horse of a browser.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]