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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

You're talking about FLoC as an alternative to third party cookies, but major browsers had already done away with those before the rollout of FLoC. If getting rid of third party cookies was two steps forward, FLoC is one step back. We're technically further ahead than where we started, but that certainly wasn't thanks to FLoC. Without it we'd be even further ahead, so that's what we should be advocating for.

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It was created so that well-behaved adtech companies could target based on FLOC alone, without having to resort to fingerprinting. Just as before, less-reputable adtech will continue to fingerprint to try to advertise to people with third party cookies turned off. As chrome continues to implement fingerprint resistance technologies, these techniques will continue to be less useful for people trying to advertise not based on FLOC alone.

Basically, it’s a way for google to implement fingerprint resistance in chrome and default to blocking third party cookies without killing their own funding source.

If you care about privacy, "well-behaved adtech companies" is an oxymoron.

> It was created so that well-behaved adtech companies could target based on FLOC alone, without having to resort to fingerprinting.

I think this is a pretty good take. With floc there is a possible storry to tell companies that want to target/customize, but only in the amount tolerated by the users.

Once thats established, it's much easier to go after shutting down businesses using less ethical means.

> major browsers had already done away with those before the rollout of FLoC

No, not really - ETP only blocks the most technically literal meaning of "third-party cookie" while still allowing plenty of tracking scripts to work with shared first-party data.

Chrome has well over 50% of the desktop browser market share, which by some measurements makes it the only major browser, and FLoC is definitely a prerequisite to Chrome disabling third-party cookie support.

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