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Comment by adamsvystun | Hacker News Reader

I hate tracking as much as the next guy, but this article is so disingenuous that it's painful to read.

If you literally look up the most upvoted HN article about FLoC [1], it specifies two main issues with FLoC in BOLD: Fingerprinting and Cross-context exposure. Which if I understand correctly the Topics API fixes. But the article implies that these are minor problems that we never really cared that much about.

Whether it is this or constant aggressive writing, it seems that the goal of this blog post is to simply inspire anger and hate, while not furthering the discussion on the topic. Which makes this article unhelpful (if not damaging) to the goal of personal data privacy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344013 [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

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In some sense you are right - the article hasn't much useful criticism of Topics in comparison to FLoC (and the Brave plug at the end makes it read like an advertisement).

However I think the article is right in the sense that we shouldn't miss the forest for the trees. Image you were robbed and the robber suddenly asked if your issue with him could be solved if he only took half of what's in your wallet. Surely that would be an improvement but it doesn't solve the root issue of him robbing you in the first place.

In the same sense, I think pulling attention back to the fact that Google is building third-party tracking right into the browser - and also aggressively protecting the whole concept of tracking as some sort of fundamental necessity of the web - is justified.

> Image you were robbed and the robber suddenly asked if your issue with him could be solved if he only took half of what's in your wallet.

The pejorative robbed is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Advertising is how users pay for free services. Making the form of payment more agreeable is a worthwhile goal.

As full disclosure I earn a living in the advertising ecosystem. Any feature that means stakeholders stop asking me to invent backdoor fingerprinting and correlate against data obtained from shady brokers is a welcome step in my opinion.

> pay for free services

If you pay for it, it's not a free service, so which is it? The whole model hinges on the fact that no kind of payment is advertised, not ads and especially not tracking. (If the GDPR prompts are good for anything then at least for making this bit more obvious)

If you treat this as payment, wouldn't you require an actual business relationship with those users?

Also by that logic, Google just unilaterally altered the contract without even so much as notifying its users about it (thanks to hidden, seamless auto-updates of Chrome)

In which other segment would you tolerate stuff like this as a customer?

Don’t pretend like you don’t know what ad-supported means.

I’ll explain it with a hypothetical example. Imagine a website called “Hacker News” where it is free to post and read and in exchange you see a few ads. Don’t now say that this HN website actually costs you something to use.

> Don’t now say that this HN website actually costs you something to use.

It costs my attention. I would be happy to support the platform itself without any middlemen.

Saying that as someone who also worked in ad tech.

Nonsense, as an individual that values my privacy I don't want to be distracted by Googles PR - Google is clearly a stalker, and users want it to stop!

The blog post makes sensible points identifying Google's PR based response. Thus your ad hominem attack on the blog instead of the content makes me wonder if you have conflicts of interest regarding this topic?

> Whether it is this or constant aggressive writing, it seems that the goal of this blog post is to simply inspire anger and hate, while not furthering the discussion on the topic.

There isn't much to discuss, I would think. This is an extremely user-hostile feature to be implemented in the clients (browsers) which comes with a lot of downsides, and absolutely no benefit to the user. I don't know how detached people at Google must be to consider this okay, or to think that any of the privacy-focused browsers would join in on this.

The people implementing this know it's not okay, their plan is to use monopoly power to force it down the world's throat.

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