DuckDuckGo Announces Plans to Block Google’s FLoC | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo Announces Plans to Block Google’s FLoC

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98 pointsyannikyeo15 comments

I find tracking abhorrent.

However, the more I read about FLoC, the more I want to also read a blog post that shows just how finely I have been identified. The practice of the theory. Like the browser fingerprinting sites we all know and love.

Is there a site out there that shows how poorly this new tech protects my privacy?

It would be great to show to people.

The EFF has https://amifloced.org/ if that helps any.

This seems to just tell you if the feature is enabled, not what information or interests your FLoC provides?

Or does it provide more information on your cohort if it's enabled in your browser? (It wasn't in mine.)

There are a lot of scary words and graphics and implications, but I'm not sure this does a good job explaining what the issue with the proposal is or why it's bad for privacy.

The TLDR seems to boil down to that the EFF will not be able to tell you what information or interests your FLoC provides, but large advertisers and ad companies will be able to - because they run the same code and can read FLoC identifiers off a ton of people.

To EFF your floc code is just noise.

To large ad networks, they see that people with floc code xxx typically show up on sites a,b,c,d,e,f,g because they have the ability to read floc identifiers originating from those sites.

The EFF's Cover Your Tracks tool may be what you're looking for.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

it will identify you in a group of a few thousands other people.. google said the cohorts should not be too big.

the main problem with floc in my opnion is that it extend tracking to sites where no tracking happened before.

today to track they need you to go to a site that has an ad or a "social media" button. basically something that make you access their server while telling the site you came from, maybe set some cookie while there so they will know you are you when you access some other site..

if a site does not have any ads or does not have social media buttons they cannot track you there.. the same if you enable adblocking..

now with floc it will use every site you accessed in the last week to calculate your floc.. so they will know what sites you are visiting even if those sites does not have anything that would allow you to be tracked today or if you use adblocker and stop them from tracking by other means..

Here's DuckDuckGo's announcement, on their Spread Privacy blog: https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/

> DuckDuckGo finds it especially concerning that getting tracked via FLoC is not optional – all Chrome users are automatically opted into it.

Is not clear to me that when Chrome will get updated with FLoC:

1 - FLoC will be auto-enabled for current users/new installations but will be possible for a regular user opt-out from the Chrome settings panel.

2 - Idem to 1 but users will not be able to opt-out at all.

Someone can clarify that?

1 is already a terrible way to introduce the "feature" but 2 is even worse.

Has Google allowed Chrome users to opt out of other tracking "features" in the past? They've gone as far as deprecating add-on APIs required for ad-blockers to work efficiently, I don't think the Chrome product folks care to give users any real choice in this.

They can still slowly disable or hide the ability to opt-out later

Look at the removal of subdomain like "www." in displayed URL

Even if DuckDuckGo is obviously doing some marketing here, I think it does not matter, we should collectively act against Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple while we still can.

Google could introduce a feature that cures cancer and DuckDuckGo would come out against it.

I'm not making an argument for or against FLoC, but this is hardly surprising given ddg's positioning as a Google competitor and their previous marketing campaigns against them.

What an odd comment. FLoC is about as far from curing cancer as one could possibly get, even as a metaphor for online privacy.

Thank goodness someone is taking a stand against the continuous creep of online privacy invasions, even if they're likely just a bolder in the middle of a large river.

So what should they do?

Yes, they could.

But, somewhat surprisingly, they don't. They prefer to introduce features that violate users' privacy.

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