Even Apple uses this kind of federated learning approach for their data collection needs.
Is EFF fighting to improve privacy or are they only interested in attacking certain corporations?
There are no "data collection needs" there are "data collection wants". If they asked, people would say no. To pour so much effort into manipulating people into letting themselves be monitoring and just tracking people without their consent is straight up abusive.
They asked "Hey can I have this data about you?"
We said "We´d actually rather you didn´t."
End of discussion. This is not complicated concept. Informed consent is not a complex theory, it´s possible for a class of 2nd graders to grasp it.
I don´t need new and improved ways for this dystopian garbage to be more convenient to me.
I need it so stop.
For some reason we're not properly questioning the assumption that this is remotely reasonable: why should we have tracking at all? It's as though we replaced facial recognition cameras piggy-backing on CCTV security systems with chipping every citizen and then saying "but it's just a better tracking system" rather than "is this even reasonable?"
What advertisers have is going away, whether FLoC gets implemented or not, FLoC is Google throwing the advertising industry a bone so they don't get accused of anti-competitive behaviour by implementing rules in their OS and browser businesses that will affect them less due to all their first party users when customer and regulatory pressure forces them into following Apple
But just because it's federated doesn't mean it's privacy friendly or creates a massive subtle vendor locking situation.
As a replacement for server-side tracking? Which part of this is not a net win for privacy?
The way google implements it all of it!
Google will assign you a Id, sure this Id is shared with others but on a It/Statistic scale it's not that many others. Furthermore every website you and every add on it gets the Id.
If you combine that id with other identifying information you can easily extract from a browser without needing any permissions you get a pretty close to or maybe even fully unique id!
In the end while it seems to be an improvement on the first look it actually makes deeply privacy invasive tracking easier, not harder.
EDIT: At the same time it allows google to pretend to be good in front of law makers. And potentially hide behind things like "our AGBs require that you don't abuse the Id" (which given that it's send to anyone independent of weather or not they agreed to the AGBs is stupid, and also even if every one did agree to the AGBs common abuse of the android advertiser Id without consequences shows how well that works.)
A proper federated ad system doesn't provide a way to unique identify you to advertisers. It lets advertisers provide a selection of labeled add slots and the browser then pics one of them without any information besides the choice ever going to the advertiser. This (oversimplified presented approach) still can slightly be abused. But is one of the few ways you can have personalized ads without a absurd invasion of privacy.
> Genuinely - what's stopping Firefox from implementing this and sending a set of data that's either chosen by you in UI or setting it to empty?
I haven't looked at the tech but most likely it might involve certificates, drm, and legal agreements which would make it impossible for a cooperation to do so.