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Comment by kemonocode | Hacker News Reader

> While I do understand that some people may not like it, I don't see how FLoC is particularly harmful.

Sure, I can give an example: it goes beyond simple basic fingerprinting, it allows you to be associated with a group of "others" (your cohort) in ways that can be dangerous to you.

Suppose you live in a country where you may not enjoy certain freedoms or some behaviors may be outlawed; end up in the wrong cohort(s) and a state actor will be able to know these things rather easily, this is not to say there aren't already means to do it today, but why make the job even easier for them?

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> state actor will be able to know these things rather easily

But state actors won't be able identity me individually, so I don't see the harm either. And you can actually reset you FLoC id at any time.

I think advertisers (like Facebook) know that this will damage their revenue and doing mass brain wash to make people think this is harmful for everyone (Cambridge Analytica style).

https://web.dev/floc/

Replace "hiking boots" with "dissent" in this example.

I'm afraid I don't get what you mean.

> But state actors won't be able identity me individually, so I don't see the harm either.

Why wouldn't they be able to? FLoC tells them you're a dissenter, your IP tells them who you are.

Just because you can reset it doesn't mean that you should have to be constantly afraid of your browser working against you. You're just listing ways in which FLoC is slightly less terrible than some maximally terrible hypothetical version. It doesn't make FLoC proper less bad.

I would argue the very notion that your recent browsing history affects what you see in the present is a wrong and dangerous one.

My browser is already working against me by allowing 3rd party cookies. When FLoC comes along 3p cookies will eventually be disabled by chrome as a long term goal. I see FLoC as less bad than 3p cookies in this case, because I can't tell trackers "hey, please reset all knowledge you have of the tracking of this specific cookie".

> I would argue the very notion that your recent browsing history affects what you see in the present is a wrong and dangerous one.

It already does, 3p cookies do exactly that and deleting them is a pain because you would also be getting rid of legitimate cookies, so you have very little or no control. Reseting your FLoC id is as easy as pressing a button and you don't have to worry about having to re-login everywhere.

Third-party tracking cookies have not been a problem in my browser (Firefox) for quite a while now, since they get blocked by default. Firefox also recently introduced Total Cookie Protection, which is a feature isolating cookies by the origin on which they were created on. (https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/24/firefox_cookies_86/)

So the argument for FLoC is moot because this is actually a false dilemma. We shouldn't be acting as if it is a choice between either third-party cookie or FLoC. Rather, we should reject both.

Aside: In some ways, FLoC is worse than third-party cookies since the latter are not under central control and do not provide a way of automatically grouping an entire browser user population into similarity groups based on past browser history.

As someone who lived in such country and has a lot of friends who still live there, I wouldn't care about it too much. The governments of such countries are usually not interested in find every single citizen who's interested in some topic. What they are interested in is suppressing people who are promoting "wrong" values. And you don't need a vague advertising identifier to find such people.

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