6 ms·

I’m disappointed by the tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions, and it’s denial of the long-term corrosive societal effects of the surveillance econom

I’m disappointed by the tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions, and it’s denial of the long-term corrosive societal effects of the surveillance economy. I’m not surprised however. Quoting Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

skybrian 3y ago
I'm disappointed (though not surprised) by people condemning things without trying them. You can turn this feature on, wait a week, and see what Ad Topics it finds. I've done that and in my case it's entirely harmless: * Arts & entertainment * Computers & electronics * Internet & telecom * News * Online communities It seems better than whatever nonsense third-party cookies are doing? Maybe it's different for someone else, but I'll get concerned when someone actually reports a problem.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  a) coarse grained tracking is still tracking, and you're revealing more bits than you might think, here's a good example with current tracking: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ b) this is just the tip of the camel's nose. Expect the tent to be crowded soon if the topics api gets pushed through c) third party cookies are dying on their own, thankfully. It's not a binary choice, we can reject both the old bad technology and the new bad technology
  - klabb3 3y ago
    > b) this is just the tip of the camel's nose. Expect the tent to be crowded soon if the topics api gets pushed through This. Obviously Google know it’s controversial and rolls it out in the most innocent way possible. This is always the playbook for unpopular changes. The short term goal is clearly to get the infrastructure to be accepted. That’s how I’d do it, after thinking about for 10 seconds.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      I guess but it's entirely client side, if it ever becomes too much or you just don't want it to start with you just seed it with static topics and call it a day. It's so so so much better than FLoC.
      - Bu9818 3y ago
        Is this a supported feature by Google, or does it require client modifications/forks? If the latter, with Web Environment Integrity it's conceivable that this may not be possible with many sites in the future.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    Most of the time I don't mind revealing a few bits. I'm logging in to many sites anyway (including Hacker News), and revealing a lot more bits in things like my profile and all the comments I posted here over the years. Opsec isn't an issue because I'm not on some sort of mission. When I want to browse privately I'll do it a different way. We don't know what the future will bring, but if it starts to look iffy, I can turn it off or switch to a different browser later.
    - ianai 3y ago
      Not everybody is you and you don’t get to speak for everybody.
      - skybrian 3y ago
        Yes, of course. I'm suggesting that you check it out for yourself and not follow the privacy crowd blindly.
        gaganyaan 3y ago
        "Following the privacy crowd blindly" is loaded language, and will also do you no harm. Unlike following your suggestions blindly.
        skybrian 3y ago
        That's a prediction and we don't know the future. One possible scenario is that people install obscure projects by unknown maintainers to "protect their privacy" and get owned. A lot of security products are snake oil.
        gaganyaan 3y ago
        Let me put it differently. Rejecting obviously malicious technology like the topics api because the privacy crowd is as well is a good idea, even if you're "following blindly". Taking your advice is a bad idea, period.
- gabeio 3y ago
  > It seems better than whatever nonsense third-party cookies are doing? Better than? As in replacing? I honestly highly doubt that will ever happen, this is just additional. Advertisement & tracking have become the single most dangerous device to target specific users with malware, and this just adds more layers of assurance that you’ve found your target.
  - conradev 3y ago
    "Google is still aiming to ... turn off third-party cookies for 1 percent of Chrome users sometime in Q1 2024. The company has set a goal to completely turn off third-party cookies by Q3 2024." https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801435/google-chrome-privacy-sandbox-cookies-api-release-enabled https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801435/google-chrome-pr...
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Who wants to be manipulated into buying things they don't need? Why would I trust an advertisement to show me what is the best product vs doing my own research? How do we curtail global warming and consumption while still allowing advertising to steal our attention?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - skybrian 3y ago
    I understand my buying habits and it's not a problem. Getting a slightly different variety of ads isn't going to trick me into buying something I didn't choose to buy. (Ads may be a problem for the easily manipulated, but I think TV and direct mail are a lot worse for the elderly.)
    - II2II 3y ago
      An advertiser who leaves the consumer feeling as though they are ceding their autonomy is unlikely to be successful. If I were you, I would be very concerned by suggesting that this is only a problem for the easily manipulated.
      - skybrian 3y ago
        This is a false binary. Advertising doesn't have to be "manipulative" to be successful. For example, reminding people of something they wanted to do anyway, but forgot, isn't particularly manipulative. (There much worse tactics, though.)
        II2II 3y ago
        I'm suggesting that advertising that feels manipulative will be unsuccessful. I will agree that advertising does not have to be manipulative to be successful, though I would choose a very different example. In my books, being reminded of something that you wanted, but forgot, is still modifying my behavior. It may not have been the intent of the advertiser, but it raised the priority of something that was (presumably) low priority. That is in sharp contrast to advertising as information. If I am looking for a product for a particular task, then advertising is fine to learn about a product's existence. There are certainly flaws to using advertising to learn about products (conflict of interest as an information source, those with a bigger advertising budget can dominate in both impressions and impression), but many companies simply don't have as much access to customers so they have to pay their own way to get information out. I guess what I'm saying is that I would rather seek out advertising than have it pushed my way.
- afavour 3y ago
  It is better than third party cookies but other browsers are simply removing third party cookies. This approach is clearly less preferable for anyone that cares about privacy.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  I consider functionality like this finding any "topic" at all to be a violation of my privacy. I don't need to actually try something like this to know that I don't want my privacy to be violated by it.
- xmonkee 3y ago
  What a strange take. Why does it matter what it found? Why are you okay with any tracking whatsoever as a user?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    It isn't tracking. It's just the browser telling the server what advert types to show. The topics that it sends are calculated client side, and are randomised per site in a way that tries to avoid fingerprinting. Google could have avoided most of this silly backlash by adding an option to set your topics manually.
- Astronaut3315 3y ago
  I’d only opt in to sharing that data if I can manually set it to be completely incorrect.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  3rd party tracking cookies are highly limited in the access they have. And they can easily be blocked using readily available 3rd party extensions or by clearing your browser of cookies. This is tracking that’s baked right into the browser. There is very little limit to what data it can use to generate whatever information it does, and it follows you across the internet for perpetuity. It’s also a first party implementation so you’re completely beholden to Google’s decision to do what they want with it, and considering the IE like chokehold Chromium has on internet browsing, most people will be subject to whatever Google decides to do. Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google. There is a substantial qualitative difference between a 3rd party tool that can easily be blocked by the first party vendor (the browser) and or modifications to it using extensions, and a first party tool doing the tracking itself.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    Topics is going to be far easier to block with an extension, or to have an extension provide fake data for, than 3rd party cookies ever were. Blocking 3rd party cookies always had a big risk of breaking stuff, since they could be used for legitimate purposes too, not just ad tracking and have built up a couple of decades worth of those legacy use cases. Topics is a tightly constrained single-purpose feature. Nothing will break when it's turned off or blocked. But also, it's not like there's much reason to use an extension to block Topics, given it's an opt-in feature (unlike 3p cookies which were opt-out) and can be turned off at any time from the settings faster than installing an extension would be. > Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google. That's totally independent of Topics though.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  Even disregarding everything else that's wrong about this... it's a completely false dichotomy. We can ban third-party cookies without allowing a replacement.
- stonogo 3y ago
  Those are the top-level categories. Each of them has subcategories which are more granular. Not all of them are public, from what I can tell. Here's an example of some that are. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v2.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
- zaphirplane 3y ago
  How do I find my ad topics ?
  - Scion9066 3y ago
    You can find the normal user view at: chrome://settings/adPrivacy/interests or look under the hood and play around with the classifier at: chrome://topics-internals/ I don't think you'll see anything if you haven't gone to a site that uses it though. There is a demo you can use to set some dummy topics at: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/demo/#the-topics-api-demo https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/dem...
- sys_64738 3y ago
  Nothing ad companies like GOOG do is for your benefit or harmless. Everything they do it to increase or maintain their ad revenue. That's why ad companies make web browsers.
jiofj 3y ago
What tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions? I have yet to hear someone say something positive about floc, lol
- lopis 3y ago
  Well the truth is there are top engineers implementing this stuff. They could probably just walk off and get any job after working for Google but here we are.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vunderba 3y ago
  I think the fact that they're being developed at all speaks volumes about FLOCS developer's lack of scruples provided FAANGs continue to shovel fistfuls of cash in their pockets.
  - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
    I will say that money can buy morals. I hate what Amazon stands for but worked for them until recently. They pay well enough that I have been able to live the life I want in the city I like without worry. Did I contribute to a company I'm morally opposed to? Sure, but the impact on my day to day life made was bigger than the day to day moral issues. When working at these places, it's never one big thing. Each project that erodes something is a fun problem to solve and you never see the total impact. Your part is so small it's not doing any harm! And then put those all together and you've got the things this post talks about.
sircastor 3y ago
I feel like the greater tragedy is the folks who do understand the thing, but they’re just turning a blind-eye towards it because the alternative is to see their own options and jobs disappear. In the face of piles of money, it’s disappointing. But I understand the person who worries about their security. And there is always someone willing to fill your spot.
charcircuit 3y ago
>I’m disappointed by the tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions The whole point of privacy sandbox is to reduce privacy invasions. There exists a problem on the web where anonymous visitors are being served unrelevant ads. That provides a bad experience to visitors and reduces the amount of money websites can make. There should be an API that makes a compromise between privacy and utility so that users can get a better experience anonymously visitable websites. The absense of such an API for this will strengthen walled gardens and disincentivize users from visiting them and site operators from making them.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  This seems like a non problem. If people are reading a tech website then they probably have some tech related interests. If they're reading an article about bicycles then... People don't like seeing their "interests" follow them around into unrelated content. That's my anecdotal observation anyway.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    This disadvantges sites which are not about a topic with a good CPM even more than they already are. People also don't spend 100% of their time on websites who topic is what they are interested in.
    - dzikimarian 3y ago
      Well, maybe they simply shouldn't advertise bikes if they are not related to bikes? It would heavily de incentivise pages with trash content that exists only to expose you to ads. That would be really good for internet.
- malwrar 3y ago
  > That provides a bad experience to visitors and reduces the amount of money websites can make. That’s a nice fantasy, but the number of ad-blocking users and ratio of advertising revenue on mobile (where adblocking is harder) vs PC suggests to me that the content of ads doesn’t affect user experience nearly as much as the quantity and intrusiveness of ads. I think the second part of your sentence is the real problem being addressed, nothing about advertising is actually designed to directly benefit consumers. I think you would be hard-pressed to find people who actually factor ad relevance into their enjoyment of an ad-supported product.

skybrian 3y ago

I'm disappointed (though not surprised) by people condemning things without trying them. You can turn this feature on, wait a week, and see what Ad Topics it finds. I've done that and in my case it's entirely harmless: * Arts & entertainment * Computers & electronics * Internet & telecom * News * Online communities It seems better than whatever nonsense third-party cookies are doing? Maybe it's different for someone else, but I'll get concerned when someone actually reports a problem.

gaganyaan 3y ago
a) coarse grained tracking is still tracking, and you're revealing more bits than you might think, here's a good example with current tracking: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ b) this is just the tip of the camel's nose. Expect the tent to be crowded soon if the topics api gets pushed through c) third party cookies are dying on their own, thankfully. It's not a binary choice, we can reject both the old bad technology and the new bad technology
- klabb3 3y ago
  > b) this is just the tip of the camel's nose. Expect the tent to be crowded soon if the topics api gets pushed through This. Obviously Google know it’s controversial and rolls it out in the most innocent way possible. This is always the playbook for unpopular changes. The short term goal is clearly to get the infrastructure to be accepted. That’s how I’d do it, after thinking about for 10 seconds.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    I guess but it's entirely client side, if it ever becomes too much or you just don't want it to start with you just seed it with static topics and call it a day. It's so so so much better than FLoC.
    - Bu9818 3y ago
      Is this a supported feature by Google, or does it require client modifications/forks? If the latter, with Web Environment Integrity it's conceivable that this may not be possible with many sites in the future.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Most of the time I don't mind revealing a few bits. I'm logging in to many sites anyway (including Hacker News), and revealing a lot more bits in things like my profile and all the comments I posted here over the years. Opsec isn't an issue because I'm not on some sort of mission. When I want to browse privately I'll do it a different way. We don't know what the future will bring, but if it starts to look iffy, I can turn it off or switch to a different browser later.
  - ianai 3y ago
    Not everybody is you and you don’t get to speak for everybody.
    - skybrian 3y ago
      Yes, of course. I'm suggesting that you check it out for yourself and not follow the privacy crowd blindly.
      - gaganyaan 3y ago
        "Following the privacy crowd blindly" is loaded language, and will also do you no harm. Unlike following your suggestions blindly.
        skybrian 3y ago
        That's a prediction and we don't know the future. One possible scenario is that people install obscure projects by unknown maintainers to "protect their privacy" and get owned. A lot of security products are snake oil.
        gaganyaan 3y ago
        Let me put it differently. Rejecting obviously malicious technology like the topics api because the privacy crowd is as well is a good idea, even if you're "following blindly". Taking your advice is a bad idea, period.
gabeio 3y ago
> It seems better than whatever nonsense third-party cookies are doing? Better than? As in replacing? I honestly highly doubt that will ever happen, this is just additional. Advertisement & tracking have become the single most dangerous device to target specific users with malware, and this just adds more layers of assurance that you’ve found your target.
- conradev 3y ago
  "Google is still aiming to ... turn off third-party cookies for 1 percent of Chrome users sometime in Q1 2024. The company has set a goal to completely turn off third-party cookies by Q3 2024." https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801435/google-chrome-privacy-sandbox-cookies-api-release-enabled https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801435/google-chrome-pr...
candiddevmike 3y ago
Who wants to be manipulated into buying things they don't need? Why would I trust an advertisement to show me what is the best product vs doing my own research? How do we curtail global warming and consumption while still allowing advertising to steal our attention?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 3y ago
  I understand my buying habits and it's not a problem. Getting a slightly different variety of ads isn't going to trick me into buying something I didn't choose to buy. (Ads may be a problem for the easily manipulated, but I think TV and direct mail are a lot worse for the elderly.)
  - II2II 3y ago
    An advertiser who leaves the consumer feeling as though they are ceding their autonomy is unlikely to be successful. If I were you, I would be very concerned by suggesting that this is only a problem for the easily manipulated.
    - skybrian 3y ago
      This is a false binary. Advertising doesn't have to be "manipulative" to be successful. For example, reminding people of something they wanted to do anyway, but forgot, isn't particularly manipulative. (There much worse tactics, though.)
      - II2II 3y ago
        I'm suggesting that advertising that feels manipulative will be unsuccessful. I will agree that advertising does not have to be manipulative to be successful, though I would choose a very different example. In my books, being reminded of something that you wanted, but forgot, is still modifying my behavior. It may not have been the intent of the advertiser, but it raised the priority of something that was (presumably) low priority. That is in sharp contrast to advertising as information. If I am looking for a product for a particular task, then advertising is fine to learn about a product's existence. There are certainly flaws to using advertising to learn about products (conflict of interest as an information source, those with a bigger advertising budget can dominate in both impressions and impression), but many companies simply don't have as much access to customers so they have to pay their own way to get information out. I guess what I'm saying is that I would rather seek out advertising than have it pushed my way.
afavour 3y ago
It is better than third party cookies but other browsers are simply removing third party cookies. This approach is clearly less preferable for anyone that cares about privacy.
VancouverMan 3y ago
I consider functionality like this finding any "topic" at all to be a violation of my privacy. I don't need to actually try something like this to know that I don't want my privacy to be violated by it.
xmonkee 3y ago
What a strange take. Why does it matter what it found? Why are you okay with any tracking whatsoever as a user?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  It isn't tracking. It's just the browser telling the server what advert types to show. The topics that it sends are calculated client side, and are randomised per site in a way that tries to avoid fingerprinting. Google could have avoided most of this silly backlash by adding an option to set your topics manually.
Astronaut3315 3y ago
I’d only opt in to sharing that data if I can manually set it to be completely incorrect.
rhaway84773 3y ago
3rd party tracking cookies are highly limited in the access they have. And they can easily be blocked using readily available 3rd party extensions or by clearing your browser of cookies. This is tracking that’s baked right into the browser. There is very little limit to what data it can use to generate whatever information it does, and it follows you across the internet for perpetuity. It’s also a first party implementation so you’re completely beholden to Google’s decision to do what they want with it, and considering the IE like chokehold Chromium has on internet browsing, most people will be subject to whatever Google decides to do. Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google. There is a substantial qualitative difference between a 3rd party tool that can easily be blocked by the first party vendor (the browser) and or modifications to it using extensions, and a first party tool doing the tracking itself.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Topics is going to be far easier to block with an extension, or to have an extension provide fake data for, than 3rd party cookies ever were. Blocking 3rd party cookies always had a big risk of breaking stuff, since they could be used for legitimate purposes too, not just ad tracking and have built up a couple of decades worth of those legacy use cases. Topics is a tightly constrained single-purpose feature. Nothing will break when it's turned off or blocked. But also, it's not like there's much reason to use an extension to block Topics, given it's an opt-in feature (unlike 3p cookies which were opt-out) and can be turned off at any time from the settings faster than installing an extension would be. > Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google. That's totally independent of Topics though.
Nullabillity 3y ago
Even disregarding everything else that's wrong about this... it's a completely false dichotomy. We can ban third-party cookies without allowing a replacement.
stonogo 3y ago
Those are the top-level categories. Each of them has subcategories which are more granular. Not all of them are public, from what I can tell. Here's an example of some that are. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v2.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
zaphirplane 3y ago
How do I find my ad topics ?
- Scion9066 3y ago
  You can find the normal user view at: chrome://settings/adPrivacy/interests or look under the hood and play around with the classifier at: chrome://topics-internals/ I don't think you'll see anything if you haven't gone to a site that uses it though. There is a demo you can use to set some dummy topics at: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/demo/#the-topics-api-demo https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/dem...
sys_64738 3y ago
Nothing ad companies like GOOG do is for your benefit or harmless. Everything they do it to increase or maintain their ad revenue. That's why ad companies make web browsers.

jiofj 3y ago

What tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions? I have yet to hear someone say something positive about floc, lol

lopis 3y ago
Well the truth is there are top engineers implementing this stuff. They could probably just walk off and get any job after working for Google but here we are.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vunderba 3y ago
I think the fact that they're being developed at all speaks volumes about FLOCS developer's lack of scruples provided FAANGs continue to shovel fistfuls of cash in their pockets.
- 6D794163636F756 3y ago
  I will say that money can buy morals. I hate what Amazon stands for but worked for them until recently. They pay well enough that I have been able to live the life I want in the city I like without worry. Did I contribute to a company I'm morally opposed to? Sure, but the impact on my day to day life made was bigger than the day to day moral issues. When working at these places, it's never one big thing. Each project that erodes something is a fun problem to solve and you never see the total impact. Your part is so small it's not doing any harm! And then put those all together and you've got the things this post talks about.

sircastor 3y ago

I feel like the greater tragedy is the folks who do understand the thing, but they’re just turning a blind-eye towards it because the alternative is to see their own options and jobs disappear. In the face of piles of money, it’s disappointing. But I understand the person who worries about their security. And there is always someone willing to fill your spot.

charcircuit 3y ago

>I’m disappointed by the tech community’s acceptance of privacy invasions The whole point of privacy sandbox is to reduce privacy invasions. There exists a problem on the web where anonymous visitors are being served unrelevant ads. That provides a bad experience to visitors and reduces the amount of money websites can make. There should be an API that makes a compromise between privacy and utility so that users can get a better experience anonymously visitable websites. The absense of such an API for this will strengthen walled gardens and disincentivize users from visiting them and site operators from making them.

jemmyw 3y ago
This seems like a non problem. If people are reading a tech website then they probably have some tech related interests. If they're reading an article about bicycles then... People don't like seeing their "interests" follow them around into unrelated content. That's my anecdotal observation anyway.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  This disadvantges sites which are not about a topic with a good CPM even more than they already are. People also don't spend 100% of their time on websites who topic is what they are interested in.
  - dzikimarian 3y ago
    Well, maybe they simply shouldn't advertise bikes if they are not related to bikes? It would heavily de incentivise pages with trash content that exists only to expose you to ads. That would be really good for internet.
malwrar 3y ago
> That provides a bad experience to visitors and reduces the amount of money websites can make. That’s a nice fantasy, but the number of ad-blocking users and ratio of advertising revenue on mobile (where adblocking is harder) vs PC suggests to me that the content of ads doesn’t affect user experience nearly as much as the quantity and intrusiveness of ads. I think the second part of your sentence is the real problem being addressed, nothing about advertising is actually designed to directly benefit consumers. I think you would be hard-pressed to find people who actually factor ad relevance into their enjoyment of an ad-supported product.