Isn't bundling users into buckets good for individual privacy? In theory if the bucket is too small you are identifiable, but my understanding is that the entire premise of this approach is to ensure that is not the case.
Most traditional adtech, used to targeting attributes, is quite puzzled at how to use this at the moment given they'll all need to invest in machine learning because these IDs aren't interpretable.
The specifications of this stuff are all in the open.
That's the key though, isn't it? While I can see that the intentions may be good, this isn't being released into a vacuum, but rather to a world where all of that other tracking infrastructure already exists.
One day I receive a request that says you are group 12345, in 1 hour you are 12346 instead because the algorithm recalculated your FLoC... Not sure what anyone can tell about that without knowing the group ids meanings, which likely not even google will know since this is going to be a clustering algorithm anyway.
As long as browser fingerprinting exists it will be possible to track the FLoC cohorts a person belongs to over time and learn much more about them than a single FLoC cohort reveals.
But AFAIK, FLoC is only replacing third-party cookies; browser fingerprinting will still be possible.
Effective fingerprinting makes everything impossible. Even if there were no 3rd party cookies and no FLoC, ad-tech can still use fingerprinting to bucket you based on your browsing history. This isn't a criticism of FLoC, this is a criticism of unwanted fingerprinting.
Sites that know who you are (e.g. because you log in) gain even more info, if they previously only knew about your visits to that site.
The fingerprinting would fail to recover the same code at least once a day unless you always visit the exact same sites every day and never visit a new one.
fingerprinting needs a stable state from the browser to work, not something that changes arbitrarily.
But beyond simply fingerprinting, it still is providing some tracking. I've seen a lot of "anonymized" data turn out to be not so anonymized in practice, or reversible to a large degree.
None of those issues apply to paid journalism.
And even without clickbait stuff people search for the news that satisfies them and their value system.
All of this happens on data voluntarily shared with the platforms people complain about like Facebook, and there's no end to this in sight.
Advertising in this forum is at the same time useless and barely works (cue the 50% advertising is wasted, don't know which one, and other similar sentences) and the most powerful tool for mind control ever existed.
Any revenue model based on the number of views (like advertising) is fundamentally flawed and will suffer from the exact same problem.
The trend towards segmenting people into ever-smaller classes to serve them more targeted ads is another cause of, not a solution to polarization.