What is FLoC and whats the big deal?
I googled https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358287/privacy-ads-goog... and it seems like an attempt by Google to add proprietary cohort based tracking to replace third party cookies. well intentioned but could have flaws. anything else i should know?
The upshot of this is advertisers only see the cohort_id, and not the history (which stays local on your browser). I think Google thinks it needs to give the advertisers something if third party cookies are going away, and this is attempting to preserve privacy.
Of course, just not sending third party cookies and not sending FLoC is the "ideal" solution if you don't have advertisers paying you, and some people were excited that third party cookies are going away, and hoped that nothing would replace them.
(Disclaimer, work on Gmail, this is my own opinion, I only really know what I read on HN)
Each browser developer would have to decide which central service to use, whether their own or somebody else's.
This is browser fingerprinting on steroids. In addition to things like screen resolution and OS, you get a FLoC ID. Browser fingerprinting already works very well. FLoC supercharges it, and adds profiling information.
FLoC also gathers information from web sites which otherwise Google could not track. Since your browser is tracking you, they don't even need Google Analytics installed.
Google owns chrome and always had the ability to track any website whether or not it had google scripts on it. If you signed in to your browser, this was already happening.
Sure but are you sharing your IP with a millions of users? That's only a single other information about you, there's a bunch others given by your browser.
Sure you'll still get the other fingerprinting there, which still allow them to track you, but before FLoC, Google couldn't imagine reducing Chrome own fingerprints, now that they are going toward FLoC, they can do that, without cannibalizing their revenue stream.
In real life, most won't deactivate FLoC, and that's where they are still going to make money. Everyone else most probably already use adblockers or already refused ad targeting from Google Ads.
Cookies uniquely identify me without additional data. Cohorts do not uniquely identify me without additional data.
This is not privacy, but it is more privacy than third-party cookies.
Problem gone.
FLoC gathers data from *all* my web browsing activity.
In addition, I have a nearly unique fingerprint from browser fingerprinting already. This makes it almost certainly unique.
It's not more privacy than cookies. It's a lot less.
If you want to block FLoC you need to turn it off in your browser.
Still seems better.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
FLoC is Google's new way to target "cohorts" of users with advertising. The idea is that Google will classify each user into a cohort (and that classification will change over time as the user visits more web pages, and perhaps other data is acquired) and only that cohort is reported to the advertiser, which can then use it to serve appropriate ads.
On the flip side, this is obviously still targeted advertising, and some people have a strong negative outlook towards that idea in general. Also, it's been said that if you can manage to track a person across just a few cohort changes, you can personally identify them, which is contrary to the entire idea about FLoC protecting a person's privacy.
In short, proponents think it's better than tracking cookies, and opponents think it's still privacy invasion, and not much better than tracking cookies.
Or illegal. IANAL, of course, but there are certain cohorts (age, disability, etc.) which are illegal to discriminate against in the US. But since Google doesn't have insight into what a cohort describes, they can't ensure that cohorts are being handled properly according to the law.
I'm sure Google has a "get out of government oversight" card from their lawyers, but like biased AI, this seems like it's on the wrong side of "grey".
https://github.com/WICG/floc#excluding-sensitive-categories
I haven't seen details of how they expect this to actually work though.
Tracking, advertising, user cohorts does not fit into the "browsing" part. That might be enough to feel why "Google's FLoC is a Terrible Idea".
> "FLoC is designed to help advertisers perform behavioral targeting without third-party cookies. A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about its user’s browsing habits, then use that information to assign its user to a “cohort” or group. Users with similar browsing habits—for some definition of “similar”—would be grouped into the same cohort. Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers. According to the proposal, at least a few thousand users should belong to each cohort (though that’s not a guarantee).
If that sounds dense, think of it this way: your FLoC ID will be like a succinct summary of your recent activity on the Web."
I didn't know much about it, and wow, sounds really terrible. I can even see it as an idea that started with good intentions, but the use cases explained (like linking floc ids to user ids in websites you signed in and potentially exposing browsing habits) make this thing really invasive; the whole idea is broken.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-re...