Isn't bundling users into buckets good for individual privacy? In theory if the bucket is too small you are identifiable, but my understanding is that the entire premise of this approach is to ensure that is not the case.
Most traditional adtech, used to targeting attributes, is quite puzzled at how to use this at the moment given they'll all need to invest in machine learning because these IDs aren't interpretable.
The specifications of this stuff are all in the open.
The fingerprinting would fail to recover the same code at least once a day unless you always visit the exact same sites every day and never visit a new one.
fingerprinting needs a stable state from the browser to work, not something that changes arbitrarily.
I absolutely hate it and can't find anything about it online, other than 2-3 people on twitter complaining about it as well. No idea how they're even doing this or how I can disable it.
Its bad but it's a fact. How many decades of outrage is it gonna take for you to accept it.
Such lack of imagination... The recorded data build behavioral profiles of the whole globe on multiple dimensions.
Edit: PS: I when I'm searching for a product, placed results (which reasonably match my intent or possible related needs) aren't ads. Those are helpful suggestions curated by payment and hopefully regulated match.
E.g. basic Gmail will be free, but if you want something like Undo Send, etc. then you'll have to pay a monthly fee for it.
And these fees from the various sites will add up quickly.
'No ads' would be preferable.
The proposal rests on the assumption that people in “sensitive categories” will visit specific “sensitive” websites, and that people who aren’t in those groups will not visit said sites. But behavior correlates with demographics in unintuitive ways. It's highly likely that certain demographics are going to visit a different subset of the web than other demographics are, and that such behavior will not be captured by Google’s “sensitive sites” framing. For example, people with depression may exhibit similar browsing behaviors, but not necessarily via something as explicit and direct as, for example, visiting “depression.org.” Meanwhile, tracking companies are well-equipped to gather traffic from millions of users, link it to data about demographics or behavior, and decode which cohorts are linked to which sensitive traits. Google’s website-based system, as proposed, has no way of stopping that.
(To be clear, this is my interpretation of what they are stating, not an assertion of fact)
The EFF is arguing that this isn't really that straightforward, as sensitive details can still be inferred from non-sensitive details.
What I'm curious about is, who is doing all the ID generation, categorization, and data centralization? Or is Chrome just going to calculate everything itself, then send the data to sites that ask for it?
A FLoC is a single ID per browser and it's not human readable, the algorithm to determine this will run in the browser so your data will never leave it. There's no real way for someone to "reverse engineer" the ID, it's just a random set of bits not "people-who-like-shoes".
Last, and I may be wrong here given this announcement, FLoC isn't part of Chrome until Chrome 91 in june, at least I think this is what the Chrome team said Tuesday at the W3C meeting so I'm not sure what this refers to, but it shouldn't be the browser side.
Each browser is assigned a single floc ID, which is (for now) a 50-bit hash that is not human readable on its own. But the floc ID is intended to capture something meaningful about browsing behavior. Two users with similar browsing history are likely to have similar, if not the same, floc IDs. Floc IDs which are close together (hamming distance-wise) also reflect similar browsing histories. (http://matpalm.com/resemblance/simhash/)
It will be totally possible to gather data about what kind of people belong to a particular floc -- provided that you operate a large website or ad network. It will probably not be possible for normal people.
There's a risk that advertisers will learn that a particular floc ID corresponds to a "sensitive category" of users. That's what google is trying to prevent.
Google plans to audit floc IDs for correlation with visits to sensitive websites. In order to do so, it's assigning a "sensitivity" label to certain websites, and then applying that label to each user who visits those websites. Then it will run analyses to see whether users with a particular floc ID are more likely to have a particular label. Floc IDs that correlate too strongly with a particluar label will be thrown out.
The passage is attempting to explain why this does not prevent adtech from learning other meaningful things about flocs -- for example, that users in a specific floc are disproportionately female, or Muslim, or suffering from depression.
As for whether FLoC is in chrome, see the origin trial page here: https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/21392...
You can opt-out of this (for now) in Chrome by disabling third-party cookies.
You can also simply use another browser such as Firefox.
The flock system sounds like the Chinese social credit score. I'm wondering what things will be conditioned on FlockID. There are going to be elite flocks and worthless flocks. "Sorry, our services are available only to flock-3453 and flock-2234. Losers like flock-23232 need not come."
your youtube is slow ? , oh honey Just click on these few websites to change your flock id to one of a more advertisement friendly one.
Looks like they found one the most computationally cheapest way to discriminate against users on the internet.
One identifier to discriminate them all :)
I think Firefox has improved significantly in recent years as well, but I haven't used it in a while.
Not sure if it would suffice to just overwrite the document.interestCohort(); function and have it report something trollish.
Since a cohort is rather small could a botnet be sufficiently large, to create its own private cohorts and mess up a lot of add deliveries?
It seems like if each user only gets a single floc grouping, that this is more private than a system like FB, where any given user could be part of thousands of different targetable "interest groups." Am I missing something? On FB, for instance, I could be targeted for liking Infinite Jest. And separately for like Mountain Biking. And separately for living in Pennsylvania. It seems like Google is doing a lot to obscure the user information into a data black box. Maybe I don't get the idea.
This effectively solves the question of optout as i can choose to use default value so that i am indistinguishable from thousands other people This also clearly allows for some targeted ads that user does actually care about. I don't mind seeing ads for technology, but all those "You wouldn't believe this!! 11", and "Look, penis!!" are just insult to humanity.
I know it's still ads. But i have an impression it's ao much better solution
Any different advertising platform will always be inferior by definition.