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Blegh, Google has to be pulled kicking and screaming towards a proposal where people actually control what information they share, inch by bloody inch. This is

Blegh, Google has to be pulled kicking and screaming towards a proposal where people actually control what information they share, inch by bloody inch. This is still just FLoC, just with slightly fewer awful bits and a different algorithm. We had FLoC, where the browser determined topics behind the scenes and users had zero control over anything. Now we have "topics" or whatever, which is still FLoC, it's just that now users can view their topics and turn them off, which is better -- but the browser is still determining all of your information in the background and auto-sending this to lots of websites. They still don't understand what the criticism was. ---- I've made this same comment multiple times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558). I really do feel like there is something deeply systemically wrong with how Google thinks about user agency in regards to data/preferences. I want to choose how I present online, and I want to be able to make that determination differently depending on the context. It's like saying that I want to choose what clothes I wear, and Google is saying, "okay, fine, we'll obviously still dress you, but if you don't like your shirt, you can tell us to change it, or you could even wear no clothes at all." No, get the heck out of my closet, I am capable of putting on my own clothes. I don't want to just be able to hide some information about myself, I don't want to make a choice over whether or not I present at all by turning the feature on/off, I don't want to exclude certain categories that I'm embarrassed about, I don't want to have a single one-size-fits all identity that goes to every website, I don't want my browser to try and guess what my identity is, I don't want a browser-maker deciding what categories are and aren't sensitive to me, and I don't want to be forced to justify how I present or to guarantee that every piece of information I give to every advertiser is accurate. I want to choose what (if any) persona I send to a website, on a website-by-website basis, and I want control over how that persona gets built, and I do not want that persona to change behind my back. I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here, but to me this is not a hard concept to grasp. The Topics API provides additional safeguards around FLoC, but does not change the fundamental nature of what FLoC is. It does not give me control over how I present online, it doesn't take Google out of the equation. And increasingly it seems that Google is just totally incapable of building a feature that gives me autonomy over anything without them stepping into the process. When Google builds a dressing room/wardrobe, they need to be inside the dressing room while I change. They have to be a third wheel in this process. They need to have some pointless AI process running to make sure everyone knows their engineers are smart, or some pointless fiddling phase where my interests change every week so that everyone knows that Google was important to this process. I hate that they are incapable of stepping out of the dressing room and letting me heckin dress myself.

mindslight 5y ago
> I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here The conceptual divide is that Google cares nothing about individuals' perspectives. To them it's not a user-agent, but rather a corporate-agent. Rather than producing software that represents users interests, users are treated as surveillance feedstock to be monitored and exploited contrary to their best interests. This is the same theme as when their snake oil "security" requests you jump through hoops despite you having entered your longstanding secure password - they're talking about their security rather than yours. The same theme as when they relegate you to robosupport hell. The same theme as when they show you endless CAPTCHA images because your browsing setup has not leaked enough information about you to satisfy their surveillance collection. The same theme as why they don't allow you to set a billing limit for Google Cloud. The same theme as why they deprecate an older product because it doesn't fit their org chart. The same theme when they throw yet another monolithic dump of Android over the wall and consign millions of advanced technological devices to becoming e-waste. This is of course a common perspective held by any large corporation, but Google is especially bad as their business was not built around receiving revenue from users directly. Rather they only profit by doing what they do "at scale", and that scale is large enough to make it so any individual simply does not matter.

mindslight 5y ago

> I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here The conceptual divide is that Google cares nothing about individuals' perspectives. To them it's not a user-agent, but rather a corporate-agent. Rather than producing software that represents users interests, users are treated as surveillance feedstock to be monitored and exploited contrary to their best interests. This is the same theme as when their snake oil "security" requests you jump through hoops despite you having entered your longstanding secure password - they're talking about their security rather than yours. The same theme as when they relegate you to robosupport hell. The same theme as when they show you endless CAPTCHA images because your browsing setup has not leaked enough information about you to satisfy their surveillance collection. The same theme as why they don't allow you to set a billing limit for Google Cloud. The same theme as why they deprecate an older product because it doesn't fit their org chart. The same theme when they throw yet another monolithic dump of Android over the wall and consign millions of advanced technological devices to becoming e-waste. This is of course a common perspective held by any large corporation, but Google is especially bad as their business was not built around receiving revenue from users directly. Rather they only profit by doing what they do "at scale", and that scale is large enough to make it so any individual simply does not matter.