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alright 41 comments and everyone seems to know what FLoC is so i’ll be that guy. What is FLoC and whats the big deal? I googled https://www.theverge.com/2021/

by swyx 6y ago

alright 41 comments and everyone seems to know what FLoC is so i’ll be that guy. What is FLoC and whats the big deal? I googled https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-google-chrome-floc-cookies-cookiepocalypse-finger-printing https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-goog... and it seems like an attempt by Google to add proprietary cohort based tracking to replace third party cookies. well intentioned but could have flaws. anything else i should know?

JackC 6y ago
I like the EFF's explainer: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
- the_lonely_road 6y ago
  If you want to learn what Floc is for the first time you probably shouldn't start with an article titled "Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea". I also don't know what it is but will just wait for a more neutral source hopefully.
  - hungryforcodes 6y ago
    Mind you from the EFF, I'll take it.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    Still holding out for an article about the benefits of Covid before you find out what that is?
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    I don't care if I'm tracked by advertisers, and I'm also not advertising, so I guess I'm pretty neutral? FLoC is Google's new way to target "cohorts" of users with advertising. The idea is that Google will classify each user into a cohort (and that classification will change over time as the user visits more web pages, and perhaps other data is acquired) and only that cohort is reported to the advertiser, which can then use it to serve appropriate ads. On the flip side, this is obviously still targeted advertising, and some people have a strong negative outlook towards that idea in general. Also, it's been said that if you can manage to track a person across just a few cohort changes, you can personally identify them, which is contrary to the entire idea about FLoC protecting a person's privacy. In short, proponents think it's better than tracking cookies, and opponents think it's still privacy invasion, and not much better than tracking cookies.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      > opponents think it's still privacy invasion Or illegal. IANAL, of course, but there are certain cohorts (age, disability, etc.) which are illegal to discriminate against in the US. But since Google doesn't have insight into what a cohort describes, they can't ensure that cohorts are being handled properly according to the law. I'm sure Google has a "get out of government oversight" card from their lawyers, but like biased AI, this seems like it's on the wrong side of "grey".
      - nebulous1 6y ago
        They seem to be aware of this https://github.com/WICG/floc#excluding-sensitive-categories https://github.com/WICG/floc#excluding-sensitive-categories I haven't seen details of how they expect this to actually work though.
  - Pawka 6y ago
    Not going deeply into the topic (even if I'm familiar what FLoC is) what I'd expect from a browser? Well, browse the internet pages, display those correctly and fast. Tracking, advertising, user cohorts does not fit into the "browsing" part. That might be enough to feel why "Google's FLoC is a Terrible Idea".
    - muro 6y ago
      Unless you pay for the browser and the sites you visit, that's not enough for the browser to provide.
      - Pawka 6y ago
        Just curious why? What else is missing?
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Me too, thanks for the link. > "FLoC is designed to help advertisers perform behavioral targeting without third-party cookies. A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about its user’s browsing habits, then use that information to assign its user to a “cohort” or group. Users with similar browsing habits—for some definition of “similar”—would be grouped into the same cohort. Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers. According to the proposal, at least a few thousand users should belong to each cohort (though that’s not a guarantee). If that sounds dense, think of it this way: your FLoC ID will be like a succinct summary of your recent activity on the Web."
- whatever_dude 6y ago
  Great explanation indeed. I didn't know much about it, and wow, sounds really terrible. I can even see it as an idea that started with good intentions, but the use cases explained (like linking floc ids to user ids in websites you signed in and potentially exposing browsing habits) make this thing really invasive; the whole idea is broken.
Tyr42 6y ago
It's an attempt at a replacement for third party cookies. Your browser look at your history and computes a "cohort" and if other people's browsers do the same things, people with similar history will have the same "cohort". The upshot of this is advertisers only see the cohort_id, and not the history (which stays local on your browser). I think Google thinks it needs to give the advertisers something if third party cookies are going away, and this is attempting to preserve privacy. Of course, just not sending third party cookies and not sending FLoC is the "ideal" solution if you don't have advertisers paying you, and some people were excited that third party cookies are going away, and hoped that nothing would replace them. (Disclaimer, work on Gmail, this is my own opinion, I only really know what I read on HN)
- nautilus12 6y ago
  Hold up, doesn't something central still need to decide what cohort you are and store your individual data? How does it decide what cohort you are locally without pulling data about other users down locally or sending your individual data up? Is it comparing your behavior tensor with the cohorts or something like that?
  - nebulous1 6y ago
    Yes, although the central service provides data that a browser-side algorithm can use to put the user into a cohort. The browser history itself isn't directly sent to the service. Each browser developer would have to decide which central service to use, whether their own or somebody else's.
- woofie11 6y ago
  This is not attempting to preserve privacy. This is attempting to give a pretense of preserving privacy, while completely deanonymizing the web. This is browser fingerprinting on steroids. In addition to things like screen resolution and OS, you get a FLoC ID. Browser fingerprinting already works very well. FLoC supercharges it, and adds profiling information. FLoC also gathers information from web sites which otherwise Google could not track. Since your browser is tracking you, they don't even need Google Analytics installed.
CivBase 6y ago
FLoC is Google's loophole after disabling third-party cookies in Chrome and promising they "will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web"[0]. FLoC is a new tracker to replace third-party cookies, but it works by putting users in groups and tracking those groups, so they technically aren't tracking "individuals" this time. Except you can use FLoC to track individuals by identifying them as a unique intersection of many disparate groups[1]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-replacing-third-party-cookies-privacy-sandbox https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-re... [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100 https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pwm 6y ago
  Over time everyone will be in their very own singleton group :)
  - russh 6y ago
    Yes, but a totally anonymous singleton group... with a unique ID.
    - poundofshrimp 6y ago
      Not anonymous if you give your PII to create accounts on the web.
- poundofshrimp 6y ago
  The GH issue is interesting. Suppose each user belongs to two flocks, and each website gets randomly shown one of the two. Will this solve the problem? I’d imagine the number of possibilities after a certain while will make it impossible that cohort histories collected by two different websites will match for the same user.
geoduck14 6y ago
Thanks for being that guy. I thought HN had decided FLoC was good, but I guess not.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AntiImperialist 6y ago
Yes, the most important thing you should know here is that corporate "education" makes otherwise intelligent people misguided. FLoC is an AMAZING piece of technology, specially for privacy. It doesn't need any central collection of data and yet it can help companies serve ads like its done today. Everybody wins... except some big companies which rely on central collection of private data... or don't at all and just want to hurt the advertisement industry so that they can retain more users (more on this later). Google just wants to serve ads so they don't care about tying private data to YOU, they just want to know if you vaguely match a category, hence they want to promote the use of FLoC. You read mostly negative sentiments against FLoC but not any detailed critique of it, because if you understood it, you wouldn't be against it... or at least not as much. A big loss here is EFF, which has largely been the sane voice, but in this regard, they have been very shallow. Having said that, you can understand a lot about what FLoC is by reading their detailed articles on it : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-privacy-sandbox-1 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv... What they don't tell you is that if there is no accessible advertisement industry, we will have less free people... like the Apple users. Apple doesn't like any other competitors advertising to their audience because they know that they are not competitive and their entire business model relies on over-charging customers and vendor locking customers into their eco-system... making it more and more difficult for them to get out of it. Microsoft has a similar foothold on the B2B market. A free market needs easy means of advertisement so that competent products can reach the masses without having to spend a lot. Long-term, FLoC is not necessarily great for Google because the profiling can be accessed by any advertiser, big or small... it democratizes ad-targeting, which is great for the free market in general, not so much for anti-free market players like Apple and Microsoft. If the cheap ad-market is no longer viable because of companies like Apple and Microsoft suppressing it, we will have more of these vendor-locked-in users... and everyone having to rely on mass market advertising (think Super Bowl ads) which is only accessible to the already established players. So, the internet will change from a rich vibrant ecosystem into the days of newspapers and TV, like we had before, only served differently.

by swyx 6y ago

JackC 6y ago

I like the EFF's explainer: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

the_lonely_road 6y ago
If you want to learn what Floc is for the first time you probably shouldn't start with an article titled "Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea". I also don't know what it is but will just wait for a more neutral source hopefully.
- hungryforcodes 6y ago
  Mind you from the EFF, I'll take it.
- Igelau 6y ago
  Still holding out for an article about the benefits of Covid before you find out what that is?
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I don't care if I'm tracked by advertisers, and I'm also not advertising, so I guess I'm pretty neutral? FLoC is Google's new way to target "cohorts" of users with advertising. The idea is that Google will classify each user into a cohort (and that classification will change over time as the user visits more web pages, and perhaps other data is acquired) and only that cohort is reported to the advertiser, which can then use it to serve appropriate ads. On the flip side, this is obviously still targeted advertising, and some people have a strong negative outlook towards that idea in general. Also, it's been said that if you can manage to track a person across just a few cohort changes, you can personally identify them, which is contrary to the entire idea about FLoC protecting a person's privacy. In short, proponents think it's better than tracking cookies, and opponents think it's still privacy invasion, and not much better than tracking cookies.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    > opponents think it's still privacy invasion Or illegal. IANAL, of course, but there are certain cohorts (age, disability, etc.) which are illegal to discriminate against in the US. But since Google doesn't have insight into what a cohort describes, they can't ensure that cohorts are being handled properly according to the law. I'm sure Google has a "get out of government oversight" card from their lawyers, but like biased AI, this seems like it's on the wrong side of "grey".
    - nebulous1 6y ago
      They seem to be aware of this https://github.com/WICG/floc#excluding-sensitive-categories https://github.com/WICG/floc#excluding-sensitive-categories I haven't seen details of how they expect this to actually work though.
- Pawka 6y ago
  Not going deeply into the topic (even if I'm familiar what FLoC is) what I'd expect from a browser? Well, browse the internet pages, display those correctly and fast. Tracking, advertising, user cohorts does not fit into the "browsing" part. That might be enough to feel why "Google's FLoC is a Terrible Idea".
  - muro 6y ago
    Unless you pay for the browser and the sites you visit, that's not enough for the browser to provide.
    - Pawka 6y ago
      Just curious why? What else is missing?
chrisweekly 6y ago
Me too, thanks for the link. > "FLoC is designed to help advertisers perform behavioral targeting without third-party cookies. A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about its user’s browsing habits, then use that information to assign its user to a “cohort” or group. Users with similar browsing habits—for some definition of “similar”—would be grouped into the same cohort. Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers. According to the proposal, at least a few thousand users should belong to each cohort (though that’s not a guarantee). If that sounds dense, think of it this way: your FLoC ID will be like a succinct summary of your recent activity on the Web."
whatever_dude 6y ago
Great explanation indeed. I didn't know much about it, and wow, sounds really terrible. I can even see it as an idea that started with good intentions, but the use cases explained (like linking floc ids to user ids in websites you signed in and potentially exposing browsing habits) make this thing really invasive; the whole idea is broken.

Tyr42 6y ago

It's an attempt at a replacement for third party cookies. Your browser look at your history and computes a "cohort" and if other people's browsers do the same things, people with similar history will have the same "cohort". The upshot of this is advertisers only see the cohort_id, and not the history (which stays local on your browser). I think Google thinks it needs to give the advertisers something if third party cookies are going away, and this is attempting to preserve privacy. Of course, just not sending third party cookies and not sending FLoC is the "ideal" solution if you don't have advertisers paying you, and some people were excited that third party cookies are going away, and hoped that nothing would replace them. (Disclaimer, work on Gmail, this is my own opinion, I only really know what I read on HN)

nautilus12 6y ago
Hold up, doesn't something central still need to decide what cohort you are and store your individual data? How does it decide what cohort you are locally without pulling data about other users down locally or sending your individual data up? Is it comparing your behavior tensor with the cohorts or something like that?
- nebulous1 6y ago
  Yes, although the central service provides data that a browser-side algorithm can use to put the user into a cohort. The browser history itself isn't directly sent to the service. Each browser developer would have to decide which central service to use, whether their own or somebody else's.
woofie11 6y ago
This is not attempting to preserve privacy. This is attempting to give a pretense of preserving privacy, while completely deanonymizing the web. This is browser fingerprinting on steroids. In addition to things like screen resolution and OS, you get a FLoC ID. Browser fingerprinting already works very well. FLoC supercharges it, and adds profiling information. FLoC also gathers information from web sites which otherwise Google could not track. Since your browser is tracking you, they don't even need Google Analytics installed.

CivBase 6y ago

FLoC is Google's loophole after disabling third-party cookies in Chrome and promising they "will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web"[0]. FLoC is a new tracker to replace third-party cookies, but it works by putting users in groups and tracking those groups, so they technically aren't tracking "individuals" this time. Except you can use FLoC to track individuals by identifying them as a unique intersection of many disparate groups[1]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-replacing-third-party-cookies-privacy-sandbox https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-re... [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100 https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pwm 6y ago
Over time everyone will be in their very own singleton group :)
- russh 6y ago
  Yes, but a totally anonymous singleton group... with a unique ID.
  - poundofshrimp 6y ago
    Not anonymous if you give your PII to create accounts on the web.
poundofshrimp 6y ago
The GH issue is interesting. Suppose each user belongs to two flocks, and each website gets randomly shown one of the two. Will this solve the problem? I’d imagine the number of possibilities after a certain while will make it impossible that cohort histories collected by two different websites will match for the same user.

geoduck14 6y ago

Thanks for being that guy. I thought HN had decided FLoC was good, but I guess not.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

AntiImperialist 6y ago

Yes, the most important thing you should know here is that corporate "education" makes otherwise intelligent people misguided. FLoC is an AMAZING piece of technology, specially for privacy. It doesn't need any central collection of data and yet it can help companies serve ads like its done today. Everybody wins... except some big companies which rely on central collection of private data... or don't at all and just want to hurt the advertisement industry so that they can retain more users (more on this later). Google just wants to serve ads so they don't care about tying private data to YOU, they just want to know if you vaguely match a category, hence they want to promote the use of FLoC. You read mostly negative sentiments against FLoC but not any detailed critique of it, because if you understood it, you wouldn't be against it... or at least not as much. A big loss here is EFF, which has largely been the sane voice, but in this regard, they have been very shallow. Having said that, you can understand a lot about what FLoC is by reading their detailed articles on it : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-privacy-sandbox-1 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv... What they don't tell you is that if there is no accessible advertisement industry, we will have less free people... like the Apple users. Apple doesn't like any other competitors advertising to their audience because they know that they are not competitive and their entire business model relies on over-charging customers and vendor locking customers into their eco-system... making it more and more difficult for them to get out of it. Microsoft has a similar foothold on the B2B market. A free market needs easy means of advertisement so that competent products can reach the masses without having to spend a lot. Long-term, FLoC is not necessarily great for Google because the profiling can be accessed by any advertiser, big or small... it democratizes ad-targeting, which is great for the free market in general, not so much for anti-free market players like Apple and Microsoft. If the cheap ad-market is no longer viable because of companies like Apple and Microsoft suppressing it, we will have more of these vendor-locked-in users... and everyone having to rely on mass market advertising (think Super Bowl ads) which is only accessible to the already established players. So, the internet will change from a rich vibrant ecosystem into the days of newspapers and TV, like we had before, only served differently.