[HN Gopher] Google considers switching FLoC to a topic-based app...
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Google considers switching FLoC to a topic-based approach
Author : robin_reala
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-08-17 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (digiday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (digiday.com)
| wendythehacker wrote:
| It seems there are a lot of opportunities for privacy testing
| here....
|
| -) Is is possible to re-identify webpages a user visits based on
| Cohort ID?
|
| -) E.g. can a website be built to show your "profile" and
| "interests" based on the Cohort, rather than just the FLoC ID?
| Google and others who (I assume) will share their back-end data
| will be able to build such a website.
|
| -) Can a "rainbow table of FLoCs" be pre-calcuated? This would
| allow to re-identify certain browsing habits of users
|
| -) In fact what if someone creates a Chrome extension that
| publishes visited domain names and their resulting FLoC ID -
| Imagine many people download and use it for fun! This would sort
| of decentralize the previous mentioned de-identification attacks
| and render FLoC useless for all other privacy concerned users.
|
| -) How much easier is it now to track a user with just IP address
| + FLoC ID now?
|
| BUT, what I'm missing entirely at this point is how will the web
| server (Google and other ad companies) actually *use/share* the
| Cohort information? That is not being described at all by Google
| - and seems rather critical to me.
|
| More details and testing ideas in this article:
| https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/red-teaming-floc-c...
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| At the end of the day, even if you assume good faith on Google's
| part (which I think is quite a leap), causing the user to present
| more entropy to the site will make them easier to fingerprint.
|
| 256 topics would be ceil(log2(256)) = 8 bits of entropy
|
| 30,000 topics would be ceil(log2(30000) = 15 bits of entropy
|
| As a reminder, there are ~ 10 billion people on earth, so if you
| have 34 bits of entropy or so, you can uniquely identify each
| person.
|
| So really, the way to think of this as "Google considers making
| FLoC 20% less effective at fingerprinting users", and that's not
| even considering other sources of entropy, like user agent or
| screen size.
| josefx wrote:
| > and that's not even considering other sources of entropy,
| like user agent or screen size.
|
| As a reminder: Chrome sends 16 bits of x-client-data with every
| http request aimed at Google servers. So they already have half
| the bits they need to uniquely identify your system without
| FLoC.
| jefftk wrote:
| The X-Client-Data header is only for evaluating the effect of
| changes to Chrome, not ad targeting: https://www.google.com/c
| hrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...
|
| Earlier comment with more details:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367482
|
| (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for
| myself)
| dessant wrote:
| It's understandable that people have concerns about a HTTP
| header that _could_ be used as part of a fingerprinting
| system.
|
| Is there an option in Chrome to opt-out of this data being
| sent to Google?
| anchpop wrote:
| I don't really understand this mindset. Google controls
| Chrome. They openly track every page you visit and show
| it to you at https://myactivity.google.com/ .
|
| It's possible that Google is tracking you with FLoC or
| with extra HTTP headers or whatever. But they're also
| openly tracking you all the time anyway because you use
| Chrome. If you don't trust them to use the data they
| collect responsibly, don't use Chrome. (I'm not saying
| you shouldn't pressure Chrome to collect less data, I'm
| saying it doesn't make any sense to theorize about secret
| HTTP header fingerprinting operations when they're making
| literally no effort to hide the much bigger data
| collection operation right in front of you.)
| gruez wrote:
| >They openly track every page you visit and show it to
| you at https://myactivity.google.com/ .
|
| what if I'm not signed into chrome, or have that feature
| disabled?
| gruez wrote:
| >The X-Client-Data header is only for evaluating the effect
| of changes to Chrome, not ad targeting
|
| Just like the 2fa phone numbers that people to facebook
| were for "security purposes" only, but later turned out
| they were using it for ad targeting?
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-
| your...
| Spivak wrote:
| Saying "well they could be lying" kinda makes the whole
| discussion moot doesn't it? Why even bother talking about
| FloC because they could be lying about _that_ too.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Irrespective of whether they're telling the truth or
| lying, saying Chrome sends 16 bits of x-client-data that
| can be used to identify you means Chrome sends 16 bits of
| x-client-data that can be used to identify you.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Exactly. The protocols need to not depend on "because I
| said so" or "pinky swear".
|
| This is the same problem with Apple's new SpywareKit.
| nimih wrote:
| Because neither Facebook nor Google is a single
| monolithic decision-maker that understands what it itself
| is doing. Instead, they're fragmented organizations with
| many different groups with competing interests and goals
| within them.
|
| More concretely, I think it's easy to believe that:
|
| - The Facebook software developers and product managers
| who originally built and promoted phone 2FA were being
| earnest when they said the data would never be used for
| advertising.
|
| - Some number of years later, someone elsewhere in the
| organization successfully got themselves access to that
| information without the knowledge/approval of the first
| group of people--who in all likelihood don't even work at
| Facebook anymore--and broke that original promise.
|
| Throwing your hands up in the air and crying "well if
| they're lying, then all is for naught!" ignores the fact
| that large organizations act in complex ways, and even if
| you assume good faith on behalf of the current set of
| actors, you still need to push for systems which remain
| ethical and safe if some future set of actors turns out
| to be complete scumbags.
| mishafb wrote:
| Not THAT much, e.g. people who believe conspiracy theories are
| more likely to be antivaxxers
| ggggtez wrote:
| I'm not exactly sure what you're doing with your math there,
| but I think you probably should include what you think is the
| _current_ entropy of your browsing sessions...
|
| Considering you're already aware of screen size and user agent,
| and other forms of fingerprinting, you should probably realize
| that in the pre-FLoC world, you're likely already 100%
| identified by numerous ad networks.
| omegalulw wrote:
| While your general assertion is true (log2(10billion) ceil'd is
| indeed 34) it is also misleading. For it assumes that that your
| identifier will be almost completely uniformly distributed.
| That is a very hard to achieve, in fact every team that's
| trying to track users is effectively trying to solve this
| problem.
| kleene_op wrote:
| >256 topics would be ceil(log2(256)) = 8 bits of entropy
|
| Unless several topics can be assigned to a person (which seems
| to be implied in the article), in which case that's 256 bits of
| entropy available to classify each person.
|
| >As a reminder, there are ~ 10 billion people on earth, so if
| you have 34 bits of entropy or so, you can uniquely identify
| each person.
|
| Yeah, well theoretically you could. But that assumes that
| browsers are able to extract and balance some very arbitrary
| and very specific information from the browsing habits of all
| people on earth in a perfect decision tree.
|
| In practice, lots of browsing habits overlap, making this
| decision tree far less discriminating and powerful than the
| theoretically optimal one.
|
| Though I think you are absolutely correct that in practice the
| number of bits to build up a classifier able to uniquely
| classify each person must be pretty low. Maybe a few hundreds.
|
| That may very well be possible with those 256 topics mentioned
| in that article.
|
| Also I don't understand the difference between cohorts and
| topics, apart from the fact that topic are less numerous and
| can have appealing names?
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| > Unless several topics can be assigned to a person (which
| seems to be implied in the article), in which case that's 256
| bits of entropy available to classify each person.
|
| Good catch, forgot this was a bit-vector not a single key.
|
| > Yeah, well theoretically you could. But that assumes that
| browsers are able to extract and balance some very arbitrary
| and very specific information from the browsing habits of all
| people on earth in a perfect decision tree.
|
| Not really, people have found in the past that combinations
| of user agent, screen resolution, installed fonts, installed
| extensions, and things of that sort can come very close to
| uniquely identifying individual people.
|
| > Though I think you are absolutely correct that in practice
| the number of bits to build up a classifier able to uniquely
| classify each person must be pretty low. Maybe a few
| hundreds.
|
| Exactly. It might not narrow it down to one person, but
| perhaps a relatively small pool.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I imagine that advertisers wouldn't have access to the
| entire bit vector.
|
| Google would also have limit the number of bits an
| advertiser has access to.
| omginternets wrote:
| Where can I read an introduction to the concept of "entropy" in
| the sense that you're using it?
|
| I understand it's an information-theoretical concept, and also
| understand it's somehow related to randomness, but I'm not sure
| exactly how, and I would like to have a more precise
| understanding.
| [deleted]
| Seirdy wrote:
| I'm going to copy something I sent to a 13 year old to
| explain entropy in simple terms. It came up when we were
| talking about encryption. Reading forwards goes from
| dense/mathematical to conceptual; reading sections in reverse
| order does the opposite. This probably won't be useful to you
| but I have found it useful in other situations.
|
| N bits of entropy refers to 2^n possible possible states.
|
| Cryptanalysis:
|
| AES-128 has a key size of 128 bits, so there are 2^128
| possible AES-128 keys. A brute-force attack capable of
| testing 2^128 keys can break any AES-128 key with certainty.
|
| Fingerprinting:
|
| If a website measures your "uniqueness", saying "one in over
| 14 thousand people" isn't a great way to measure uniqueness
| because that number changes exponentially. Since we're
| dealing possible states, i.e. possible combinations of screen
| size, user-agent, etc., we instead take the base-2 logarithm
| of this to get a count of entropy bits (~13.8 bits).
|
| Thermal physics:
|
| The second law of thermodynamics states that spontaneous
| changes in a system should move from a low- to a high-entropy
| state. Hot particles are far apart and moving a lot; there
| are many possible states. Cold particles are moving around
| less and can't change as easily; there are fewer possible
| states. Heat cannot move from cold things to hot things on
| its own, but it can move from hot things to cold things.
| Think of balls on a billiards table moving apart rather than
| together.
|
| Entropy of the whole universe is perpetually on the rise. In
| an unimaginably long time, the most popular understanding is
| that particles will all be so far apart that they'll never
| interact. The universe will look kind of like white noise.
| And endless sea of random-like movement, where everything
| adds up to nothing, everywhere and forever.
| omeze wrote:
| Assuming light background in introductory probability, try
| the first 4 pages of this:
| https://web.stanford.edu/~montanar/RESEARCH/BOOK/partA.pdf
| omginternets wrote:
| Spot on, thank you kindly!
| btown wrote:
| This was true of FLoC and it's perhaps even more critical now
| that topics are more easy for advertisers to understand:
|
| Do. Not. Allow. Anything. LGBTQ+. Related. To. Be. A. Topic.
| Unless. It's. Opt. In.
|
| People. Live. In. Unpredictably. Unsafe. Places.
|
| People. Will. Die.
| kodah wrote:
| I've been trying to talk privacy with people for a while. Some
| folks see targeted advertising as "good" because it introduces
| them to new products or services. To some milquetoast person
| with nothing "special" going on in life that's just fine,
| however, if you are involved in anything that you don't want
| the average Tom, Dick, or Harry to know about then you're
| fighting an up-hill battle against a monster that you can't
| really see but from a distance.
|
| To me, in the United States, there are two major camps of
| thought:
|
| * Targeted advertising is useful to me and I don't mind someone
| knowing everything about me
|
| * Targeted advertising is dangerous to me for x, y, and z
| reason
|
| A world that allows both is optimal. Allow companies to collect
| data, but have federal agency oversight and requirements up to
| and including the right to be forgotten. It should be possible
| to pull a level and dump most (if not all) collected data
| associated with you.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Allow companies to collect data, but have federal agency
| oversight and requirements up to and including the right to
| be forgotten.
|
| I agree with your overall sentiment, but I think the solution
| you propose is bad. It allows companies to collect data
| automatically behind users' backs, and then tries to address
| the extreme power imbalance that creates with regulations and
| escape hatches that users can take after that data has
| already been created. But ideally, we want to prevent
| problems from occurring at all, not just to try and fix them
| after the fact.
|
| To your point about voluntary tracking, users may want to
| signal interest in some topics but not others. They may want
| to signal interest about some topics only in certain
| situations. They may want to signal interest about a topic to
| one site, but signal interest about another topic to a
| different site. They may want to "freeze" the topics that
| they signal interest about, so that they don't need to worry
| about accidentally revealing new preferences in the future,
| or to think about how browsing a set of sites will change the
| ads that they get. All of these are valid things for a user
| to want to do.
|
| It is better if users have complete agency over what data is
| transmitted, and if companies do not fingerprint or correlate
| users behind their backs _at all_. Attempting to determine
| user cohorts clientside is the correct move, arguably the
| only part of FLoC that Google got right. The problem with
| FLoC is that even if cohorts are determined completely
| clientside, the user still does not have agency and
| transparency about those cohorts.
|
| There is theoretically a version of FLoC that would be really
| good for privacy, and that would also allow the kind of
| optional tracking that some users want. Such a system would
| need to be easy for users to toggle on and off on the fly on
| a site-by-site basis. It would need to be transparent to
| users about what categories they're in, it would need to
| allow users to edit and delete their categories, to add new
| categories, and to turn off category aggregation. It would
| need to not send new categories to a website without the
| user's permission. It would need to block websites from
| determining whether they're being given an automatically
| generated category, or a user-defined category. And
| importantly, it would all need to be opt-in.
|
| Right now, tracking is an invisible system that happens
| automatically, with (rare) escape hatches that the majority
| of users are not expected to pursue, and that give little to
| no granularity about how users can customize how they present
| to the world. This kind of tracking is inherently invasive.
| We should pursue a paradigm shift where users proactively
| volunteer information about how they want to present to the
| world in any given situation -- in other words, we should
| give users agency to choose their own identities online.
|
| Most regulatory suggestions that I see online (including the
| one you give) consciously or unconsciously focus on
| preserving the invasive nature of tracking while adding
| safeguards to try and prevent advertisers from abusing the
| inherent power imbalance. Instead, that power imbalance ought
| to be totally flipped in favor of the user. We need to reject
| the underlying idea that preferences should be extracted from
| users, rather than something that users consciously choose to
| volunteer.
|
| ----
|
| I've commented to the same effect a couple of times in the
| past:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906791
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26353494
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907079
|
| This isn't only true for advertising. Think about how little
| control users have over how personalized algorithmic content
| filtering/ordering works on sites like Youtube, and you'll
| see similar conceptual problems with how the systems are
| designed. But it's really apparent in advertising, moreso
| than in other contexts.
|
| I want to fight back against policy changes that (in my mind)
| cement and normalize the current philosophical approach to
| advertising. It's not OK to be tracked without your
| permission, and regulations or safeguards and escape hatches
| around tracking aren't enough to make it OK. The system would
| still be fundamentally broken.
| kodah wrote:
| I like this take, I think I've been tired of arguing with
| people so I've been looking for some form of compromise.
| This seems to compromise nothing while keeping the system
| that certain people desire in tact. I dig it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > looking for some form of compromise
|
| I think it's kind of important when talking about privacy
| to keep in mind that the goal shouldn't be to force
| people to never reveal anything about themselves, it's to
| give them agency over what they reveal. That gets lost
| sometimes, I'm often guilty of losing sight of it as
| well. So a privacy world that makes it impossible for
| people to connect with each other, or that tells them
| that they're not allowed to present a certain way online
| is just as much of a problem as a solution that requires
| them to do so.
|
| To me, the core idea behind privacy in regards to user
| tracking is that people should have agency over what
| their identities are, over what identities they're
| "allowed" to have, and over where they share those
| identities and whether those identities are associated
| with each other. It's totally valid for people to want to
| be able to tell Google that they're interested in seeing
| certain ads, they should be able to do that.
|
| And when we expand out from privacy and look at
| algorithms on sites like Youtube/Twitter, that underlying
| idea of control becomes a bit more obvious -- it's not
| that content suggestions are bad, it's the inversion of
| control over how those suggestions are determined, the
| requirement that suggestions are constantly being
| computed and updated based on every action the user
| takes, the requirement that there be one set of
| suggestions for each user regardless of context, and the
| refusal from companies to give users the ability to do
| anything beyond slightly tweak or retrain their
| suggestions or to treat personally volunteered
| preferences as valid or trustworthy compared to what the
| algorithm determines they should like.
|
| But I do want to get Youtube suggestions for related
| videos, I just want to be in control over how that
| happens. I want to be the entity with power in that
| relationship, I want to be the entity holding onto my
| data, I don't want to have to trust Google not to abuse
| me or to ask permission for Google to forget things.
|
| This also gets at the potential benefits of a private
| world where users have real agency. It's very easy (I'm
| often guilty of this) to phrase the end goal of privacy
| as a world where tons of things just go away. But the
| reality is that targeted ads today mostly kind of stink,
| and there's a lot of potential for filtering, curation,
| and community aggregation that we can't take advantage of
| because users are excluded from the process of
| determining what they see online and how they're
| perceived by others. I wish there was more effort to try
| and describe how a private world could be _better_ for
| things like search suggestions, user-relevant ads,
| content filtering -- because in a world where users had
| control over how this stuff worked and could customize
| their own experiences, it might be possible to try new
| applications, share more information, or experiment with
| new identities without risking abuse.
|
| Imagine a world where you're an LGBTQ+ adjacent teen
| trying to figure out your own identity, and you
| temporarily turn on a category related to that for a
| subset of sites. If there's not a huge danger of
| fingerprinting, you can see how it feels for sites to
| recognize that -- maybe to tell Youtube that for right
| now you'd like to see more videos suggested based on that
| category. But you can safely do that because you know
| that other sites won't get that information, and that at
| any point you can switch the category off with zero
| consequences. You don't have to ask Google/Youtube for
| permission to edit what they know about you or to forget
| a category, you can control it locally right from your
| browser without asking anyone's permission.
|
| That opens the door for really powerful applications or
| recommendation engines that arguably couldn't be
| (morally) built today. It's not about trying to create a
| world where nobody knows anything about anyone, it's
| about flipping the power imbalance and inverting the
| current predominant narrative about how information
| should be collected online.
|
| With FLoC (and with other privacy initiatives from
| companies like Facebook), the feeling I get is that
| Google is trying to convince users that it can be a
| responsible data steward both because of internal
| policies and regulations. These companies try to create a
| narrative that the only options are either they track us,
| or that we never get anything recommended again. But
| neither of those options are what I want, what I want is
| to be my own data steward.
| ramses0 wrote:
| SS 256.4 Prohibition on undisclosed display bias.
|
| When providing information in response to a search by a
| user of the EAIS, the EAIS must order the information
| provided so that the flight options that best satisfy the
| parameters of the user-selected search criteria are
| displayed conspicuously and no less prominently (e.g., in
| the same or larger font size and the same or more
| noticeable font color) than any other flight option
| displayed.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/256.4
|
| ...............
|
| The airline industry (once upon a time) got its
| collective hand slapped because they would only display
| flights from certain carriers on "page 1" and relegated
| "other options" to "page 2".
|
| It doesn't seems like we're going to put the genie back
| in the bottle of push promotion or "algorithmic"
| ordering, and it's a very difficult battle to fight.
|
| The original genius of reddit/n.y.c display ordering
| algorithm was that it represented an aggregate priority
| order that was user-controlled (ie: 100 users give 500
| upvotes across 1000 articles, and you get to see them
| ordered 10 at a time). The site is/was the cohort, and
| "the algorithm" was shown equally to all comers.
|
| Contrast to twitter (presumably) and facebook
| (definitely) where content "chum"[0] is intermingled as
| soon as possible after the original "hook" of original or
| requested content, and tailored to the individual user.
| It's a constant stream of distraction and lies, and no
| wonder that a significant portion of net-users become
| hooked.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
| ssss11 wrote:
| I suspect you're probably right but I can't comprehend how
| anyone other than those who benefit from the digital
| advertising industry could accept that its ok for anyone
| (I.e. Everyone) to know everything about them. Isn't it
| straightforward that that scenario is disadvantageous to
| yourself in many ways?
|
| I don't personally think targeting works - does anyone have a
| good research paper that proves it?
|
| I think the optimal solution would be the old pre-internet
| advertising.. general ads on billboards, but now on websites.
| No tracking.
| fsociety wrote:
| In a way ad targeting let's businesses buy ad space to a
| smaller number of users for less money. This is in direct
| contrast to buying a small amount of space on a huge
| website, which costs more money.
|
| That means if we go back to pre-internet style of ads, then
| it will be expensive to advertise your business to a niche
| community therefore only larger companies can advertise.
|
| There is a privacy angle that needs to be figured out, and
| it is complex. But just going back to the old way just
| empowers larger businesses to beat out smaller ones. This
| is the sad reality we live in now.
| shuckles wrote:
| Can you say more about how FLoC introduces new risks that don't
| already exist with targeted ads?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Targeted ads use data that are owned by each company
| targeting. Sure you can buy/sell data in the market, but its
| somewhat decentralized.
|
| FLOC is centralized at the individual. That means YOU are
| profiled completely and all the profile info is centralized
| for everyone to grab.
| danShumway wrote:
| To expand on this: with targeted ads, if I want to find out
| if you're gay I need to figure out a way to track you
| across sites that give me that information, or to
| specifically buy that data from a company that's already
| tracking you.
|
| With FLoC, anyone can get that data without entering into
| an expensive agreement. I can get that data as a single
| person from a personal blog with no cookies. I can get that
| data directly, I don't need to sign up with another 3rd-
| party tracking company that might not tell why they're
| serving my users a specific ad or what data they have about
| them. And it's all scaleable with no extra cost to my
| operations. This opens up additional attack vectors that
| might not exist otherwise: in a small operation it may be a
| lot easier for me to fingerprint you using your IP address,
| login information, or other data I have access to and to
| correlate that to a real-world identity. When that happens,
| I also have access to all of the information about you from
| your FLoC categories, for free.
|
| On some level, Google is taking a gamble that users will be
| difficult to fingerprint or identify using FLoC so it won't
| matter that some sensitive information is leaked. But it's
| just not the case, users can be fingerprinted. And in
| scenarios where they are fingerprinted/identified, FLoC
| provides a much more complete picture of that person based
| on activity from sites that might not have ever sold that
| information, that might have never intended to leak
| information about them in the first place.
| shuckles wrote:
| I thought targeted ads let you buy an audience using all
| the information the ad network had about them. So in your
| framing, the "company targeting" would be Google, and they
| already know more than a FLOC cohort worth of information
| about you.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Yes this is true of major ad networks, but there is also
| straight data brokers who "just" buy/sell data.
|
| FB and google used to (idk about now, don't care to
| check) allow you to upload data you gathered/bought and
| use it for tracking.
|
| To prove a point, i created a fb ad to target my parents
| and family (uploaded their email, phone number,
| identifiers, interests, locations they frequent - only
| data i knew fb already had) and watched as their ads
| became "hey vineyardmike's parents. the internet is not
| private".
| josefx wrote:
| Officially Google doesn't hand out information who
| belongs to what group. With FLOC your browser tells
| everyone in what "cohort" you are, if a cohort can be
| used to identify gay people just visiting government
| websites in an anti gay country could end very badly.
| btown wrote:
| With cross-site cookies, adnetwork.com has full information
| about what sites you've visited (among sites that incorporate
| their cookies). This isn't good either! But generally
| speaking, an individual _site_ using adnetwork.com for
| advertising won 't have or want access to that vector of your
| interests; many site operators don't even have visibility
| into what ads win real-time bidding, just that they're
| receiving money for providing their inventory. Certainly
| there are players that can provide demographic targeting
| metadata to site operators, but to my knowledge they are less
| widely known and certainly not cheap, and I imagine (or hope)
| any players with wide enough cookie reach would be
| discouraged from maintaining a database that could associate
| metadata with PII.
|
| With FLoC, though, the idea was that the browser would
| provide document.interestCohort() and the individual site's
| JS could react accordingly: https://github.com/WICG/floc .
| This means that any site, regardless of its contracts with ad
| networks, could immediately identify your cohort and
| associate it with your activity. Web developers working in
| good faith would be encouraged to have user.cohort or
| user.topic fields from day one "just so you have it" -
| imagine all the ways someone could use this in bad faith.
| Inevitably this data would leak (or be intentionally leaked)
| and could trivially become a target list for doxxing closeted
| people. It's a dangerous, dangerous proposal.
| shuckles wrote:
| I didn't understand that the browser would make FLOC
| cohorts directly available to anyone running JavaScript in
| my browser. Unless Google also solves fingerprinting (not
| to mention that I identify myself on many websites), I'm
| not sure I understand how this is viable. It seems even
| worse than the old criticism that Google was selling my
| data. It never did that, but now it's giving away my data
| for free!
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > it's giving away my data for free
|
| It shows that google no longer things owning data is a
| competitive advantage.
|
| This seems like it should be bigger news.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Unless Google also solves fingerprinting_
|
| FLoC is one of a collection of proposals, which does
| include preventing fingerprinting:
| https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-
| sandb...
|
| If you're not going to prevent fingerprinting, why even
| get rid of third-party cookies? Fingerprinting is a step
| backwards from cookies, since, for example, closing and
| reopening a private browsing window gives you a new
| cookie jar but the same fingerprint.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
| shuckles wrote:
| Interesting. The next question is how you inform the user
| that by identifying yourself to a website, you are also
| associating all your FLOC interests with your identity,
| which you may or may not care to do. That used to be a
| question between you and Google, but now it's between you
| and every website that has your identity. That sounds
| exhausting.
|
| I'm skeptical that fingerprinting can be "solved", but
| let's suspended disbelief.
| danShumway wrote:
| +1 to an answer for this, it's a good question.
|
| Let's say fingerprinting is completely solved. The
| browser's still going to be sending your FLoC data to
| Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/Amazon when you log in -- and
| it's not clear you'll even be able to tell what
| information that FLoC payload reveals about you.
|
| Solving fingerprinting is one thing, but there are a ton
| of situations online where users will be revealing their
| real identity to service providers, regardless of the
| fingerprinting protections. What FLoC data will be sent
| to those providers?
| danShumway wrote:
| > If you're not going to prevent fingerprinting, why even
| get rid of third-party cookies?
|
| FLoC greatly increases the potential abuses that can come
| from fingerprinting, particularly from smaller sites.
|
| So is Google committed to completely eliminating
| fingerprinting from the browser _before_ it launches
| FLoC? Because it would really stink for everyone if the
| privacy sandbox doesn 't completely block fingerprinting,
| and then the sites that manage to fingerprint users
| suddenly have a huge amount of extra data about them.
|
| What will happen if the privacy sandbox comes out and
| people are still fingerprinting through other invasive
| means, or if a hard-to-fix exploit is found, or if a
| research paper demonstrates that the privacy sandbox is
| insufficient? Will Google commit to disabling FLoC if
| that happens?
| Spivak wrote:
| Because it exposes cross-site data to every website that
| didn't have access to it previously and tracks users on
| websites that they weren't previously being tracked.
|
| FLoC is fundamentally is a proxy for your aggregate browser
| history which is something that hasn't really be exposed
| before.
| tyingq wrote:
| It's front-loaded with misleading phrases like "privacy
| first".
| tehjoker wrote:
| This is all about switching the ad targeting system from one that
| competitors could use (3rd party cookies) to one that only Google
| can use, further cementing it as the indispensable company to
| online advertisers. This issue is really an anti-trust issue.
| Google already knows everything about you.
|
| I do think it is fun to imagine what topics they could assign to
| you around the web. What about "anti-vax", "terrorist",
| "communist", or what not now totally divorced from the material
| that generated the label.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| That is one of the issues with the old cohort ID system, in
| particular: You could be placed in a group that is particularly
| concerning for targeting purposes and not even know it, because
| everything was opaque. You just see a weird cohort identifier,
| but it might inadvertently discriminate against you in some
| way.
|
| This attempts to solve this by limiting it to a much more
| limited set of topic groups that are presumably plaintext-
| readable, and it sounds like the option to remove yourself from
| ones that are incorrect may also be considered.
|
| That being said, I'm happy to use a web browser that doesn't
| consider better ad targeting a reason to implement features.
| godshatter wrote:
| If we're going to move to a target-based approach, why advertise
| through Google who knows a mash-up of topics from sites a person
| visits, instead of just making a deal with topic-based websites
| directly? Instead of trying to catch them in transit, catch them
| at their destination. As a bonus, it cuts out the middle man and
| no none has to know anything about specific web visitors because
| they are already pre-filtered based on their interests.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This is actually going back to the old model where advertisers
| targeted magazines, tv shows, etc based on their audience.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Instead of trying to catch them in transit, catch them at
| their destination.
|
| Because i have an interest in X but i frequent sites for topics
| X, Y, Z, A, B daily because i'm a complex individual. Maybe X
| is the most "valuable" topic to profit off so now A, B, X, Y, Z
| all show ads on just X.
| qeternity wrote:
| Also, it could be that people who frequent XYZ are actually
| really profitable for A but they don't know they're
| interested in A yet. This is the holy grail of marketing.
| nixroot wrote:
| They should just target ads to the webpage it's shown on rather
| than the user.
| ericyan wrote:
| They are just not going to drop this idea, aren't they? Google is
| in the online advertising business after all.
| spullara wrote:
| I'd be super happy with something like this honestly. I do want
| to see advertisements, especially for things in my areas of
| interest, while being able to control the list. I would go one
| step further and make topics opt-in with a pending list of
| inferred topics.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I wish they'd start switching back to "Don't Be Evil".
|
| But hey, shareholder value, right? Waaay more important.
| dheera wrote:
| Fiduciary duty > civil duty
|
| Welcome to capitalism.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| IANAL, but I don't believe that the fiduciary duty a
| corporation has to its shareholders allows it to ignore its
| civic duty to follow the law.
|
| Then again, rarely is lawbreaking by corporations adequately
| prosecuted. Even more rare are actual guilty verdicts
| resulting in actual punishment. Of course, "Don't be evil"
| isn't a law, and I'm not claiming Google is breaking any.
|
| So while I think I may be technically correct, reality
| certainly does seem to favor your statement. This seems like
| a fairly sad state of affairs.
|
| Is it like this everywhere capitalism is practiced? I'd think
| a visiting extraterrestrial scholar might be able to weigh
| in.
| dheera wrote:
| > I don't believe that the fiduciary duty a corporation has
| to its shareholders allows it to ignore its civic duty to
| follow the law.
|
| I agree with this. But laws and ethics are two different
| things. Corporations often do things that are in line with
| the law but unethical. By "civil duty" I meant ethics.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Fiduciary duty > civil duty
|
| No it isn't.
| erhk wrote:
| Explain your reasoning
| nixass wrote:
| Whatever Google chooses you know it will for Google's benefit and
| on user's disadvantage.
| john_yaya wrote:
| I was about to dispute this and say, "no, most business
| relationships are win-win." Then I remembered that Google's
| business relationships aren't with their users. So, yes, you're
| no doubt correct about that.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Whenever I see news about Googs making a decision, it is always
| read with "how will this ultimately be screwing the users". If
| Googs decides to stop doing some invasive data collection it is
| only because they have found something better.
| jefftk wrote:
| Users benefit from a web where sites can make money by showing
| ads, because the alternatives (primarily paywalls) are worse.
| More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads
|
| (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
| dessant wrote:
| Google's aberrated view of privacy and the role ads should
| play in our lives is partly why we have to constantly be on
| the lookout and expect to end up being screwed regardless,
| even if we pay $4000 for a device that runs Google TV.
| luckylion wrote:
| Without ads, content quality would go up, because very few
| people will pay for low quality content. And if quality goes
| up, people are happy to pay for it.
|
| With ads, content quality goes down. You don't need to
| convince people that your content is worth reading, you just
| need to convince Google. Slap a few expired domains on your
| text-spinner generated content and off you go.
|
| Not all content is created equal, and Made-For-Adsense
| content would not have been made otherwise and would not take
| away attention from quality content.
|
| I believe you're rationalizing your paycheck.
| dogleash wrote:
| >because the alternatives (primarily paywalls) are worse
|
| Weird position to take when most high-quality content is
| already shifting to a paywall model (or didn't base their
| business model on advertising in the first place). And ad-
| supported content is in a race to the bottom meaning any
| content useful beyond light entertainment is drying up.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Yes, jeff. We all remember your articles in which you argue
| that invasive, track-all-of-your-life ads are somehow good.
|
| They are not.
|
| The world has survived for millenia without _tracking_ ads.
| greiskul wrote:
| And how long as the open web survived? Cause I see a lot of
| it dieing every day, being replaced with walls.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > And how long as the open web survived
|
| For a very, very long time.
|
| > Cause I see a lot of it dieing every day, being
| replaced with walls.
|
| That's because companies feel value in silos and
| extracting every cent they can out of users.
| gxnxcxcx wrote:
| The open web never felt the urge to become walled before
| the ad peddlers made it addicted to revenue.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >And how long as the open web survived?
|
| Since its birth, clearly. No matter how you try and spin
| this, advertising is not a requite for a free and open
| Web. If ads were to disappear tomorrow, web sites which
| society has deemed important will survive, the others (if
| income was necessary in the first place) will indeed
| perish. And we will be just fine.
| easrng wrote:
| Tracking and profiling users is completely unnecessary.
| Context-based, non-intrusive, ads are reasonable and better
| than paywalls and users won't hate them. I wish someone would
| make https://ethicalads.io but not just targeted at
| developers.
| ericholscher wrote:
| We're looking into the option of expanding our network or
| offering it as a SaaS for others who are wanting to build
| something similar for other audiences. The software works
| great for any content-based targeting, and we're excited to
| expand to other niches to push the vision forward as we can
| :)
| rchaud wrote:
| This neatly sidesteps the reality that Google itself takes
| actions to makes Adsense revenue completely unpredictable.
| The "confirmed clicks" program created a ton of instability,
| with no real explanations from Big G:
|
| https://digiday.com/media/googles-confirmed-clicks-
| initiativ...
| gxnxcxcx wrote:
| It has indeed enabled the professionalization of the
| endeavor, but the shift in incentives for content creation
| has irreversibly changed the shape of the mainstream
| internet, and not necessarily for the better as far as the
| user is concerned.
|
| The monetized web has in a lot of measures exceeded the
| frontiers of what the ragtag petite bourgeoisie of the early
| internet could ever be but, in the process, the great
| majority of us (both users and the very long tail of non-top
| content creators) have invariably become peasants.
|
| I'm not saying there was any other way to have what we have
| now, but what we have now kinda ain't sooo good when one
| isn't the middleman in a process architected for the
| middleman's benefit.
| rektide wrote:
| Doing nothing & leaving the internet insecure is in every other
| media & ad & host's interest, because currently it's insecure.
| Making privacy better is indeed to Google's benefit. Because
| Google has a 1st party relationship with users: users visit
| Google.com, Google sees where we go.
|
| But this is not to a user's dis-advantage. Google genuinely is
| trying to find a good path forward. The proof to me comes in
| the quest for alternatives. Find anything else pro-user being
| suggested. Find ANYTHING. There's nothing. It's barren.
|
| There is a huge astroturfed war going on. Google is trying to
| do good. It's trying to find some compromise between content-
| holders & users. The content-holders are stirring up a colossal
| storm because they want what they have, which is everything.
| They're winning this PR blitz. Low, cheap, pervasive attacks on
| Google are winning this war, & it's users who are losing.
| danShumway wrote:
| > The proof to me comes in the quest for alternatives. Find
| anything else pro-user being suggested. Find ANYTHING.
| There's nothing. It's barren.
|
| Every major browser other than Google is taking proactive
| steps to limit cookies right now. Firefox very recently
| announced better cookie deletion for sites; they'll now try
| to delete cookies from other domains that are linked to those
| sites. This is going to get progressively better and better.
|
| But the sentiment here is exactly what Google promotes. It
| begs the question over whether or not we _need_ to compromise
| with content-holders on privacy. We don 't, no browser other
| than Chrome views user tracking as a necessary compromise
| with advertisers. There was a point in the past where we
| might honestly worry about whether it was feasible to block
| 3rd-party cookies, but since then multiple efforts and
| improvements from Mozilla and Safari have made it clear that
| browser manufactures don't have to get advertisers'
| permission to push code.
|
| Google is refusing to proactively move forward with steps
| that everyone else has agreed are necessary, because Google
| is mad that we're not thinking enough about their business
| interests. We have a good path forward, Google is blocking it
| for a large number of users, and then Google is complaining
| "why is no one else except us coming up with _solutions_? "
| But we have come up with solutions, they're just not
| solutions that Google likes.
|
| The caution from Chrome about cookies is really interesting.
| Chrome broke web audio, alerts, the dev team is regularly
| openly hostile to suggestions that the consensus process
| moves too quickly. They tried tried to deprecate the _url_
| for crying out loud, but now they want to be all cautious
| about cookies? Sure.
|
| > There is a huge astroturfed war going on.
|
| Agreed, but not in the direction that you're suggesting. The
| general public wants better privacy, they don't care about
| whether or not it makes advertisers happy. Nontechnical users
| are often misinformed about tracking and they often lack
| technical skills or willpower to increase their privacy on
| their own. But that doesn't mean the public doesn't care
| about privacy, ordinary users do support the figerprinting
| protections Apple is building into iOS, they support the
| privacy changes Mozilla is building into Firefox. Most
| ordinary people are on the side of privacy in this debate.
|
| Advertisers are desperate to argue that users are being
| harmed or that moving forward without an alternative tracking
| system is impossible, when the reality is that even the
| nontechnical public has turned out to have overwhelmingly
| positive feelings towards on-by-default technical measures to
| reduce tracking. The astroturfing here is the FUD coming out
| of companies claiming that we need (for either moral,
| technical, or PR reasons) to compromise with advertisers
| before we can move forward removing 3rd-party cookies.
|
| It's really only Google who is lagging on this stuff. If they
| want the least private browser on the market, then they can
| have it. I don't think we need to hold back everyone else
| while we wait for Google to make up their mind about this.
| jsnell wrote:
| Google is being told by a major regulatory authority to not
| restrict third-party cookies in Chrome without a
| replacement mechanism approved by said regulator. They
| literally do not have the option of doing any of what you
| said they should do.
| danShumway wrote:
| It is legitimately a problem that the UK is pressuring
| Google over this, but that does not necessarily mean that
| Google doesn't have the option to toggle settings about
| cookies in other markets.
|
| This is exactly how the rollout of DoH has worked,
| different regions have had rollouts at different rates,
| particularly in regions where legislators are concerned
| about market effects. If the UK moves to block that too,
| then maybe then we have a more serious problem. But
| Google should be trying to roll out these protections in
| areas where it can.
|
| It also doesn't mean that the UK is opposed to
| restricting 3rd-party cookies. The UK is worried about
| Google privileging their own ads. That's not the same
| thing as demanding a compromise with advertisers to
| enable cross-site tracking before cookies are removed,
| it's a requirement that Google not use the removal of
| 3rd-party cookies to give themselves outsized control
| over the advertising ecosystem.
| jsnell wrote:
| Your last claim is highly misleading. The position of the
| CMA is that other advertisers need 3p cookies but Google
| doesn't. So it's just not true that they would have been
| fine with a straight out removal of 3p cookies with no
| replacement mechanism. They will demand there to be some
| mechanism that gives small ad tech companies more data
| than FLOC did.
|
| As for the first point, do you have a region in mind
| where the regulatory authorities have greenlit this?
| Certainly not anywhere in the EU, given they launched a
| pre-emptive probe into the plans before anything was
| launched. Or in the US, where the unlaunched plans are
| included in the antitrust complaint being driven by the
| states.
|
| Look, there's a lot of complaints one can direct at
| Google. But this isn't one of those things. Given the
| amount of scrutiny how could they possibly unilaterally
| launch anything related to this, beyond tiny experiments?
| danShumway wrote:
| > how could they possibly unilaterally launch anything
| related to this, beyond tiny experiments?
|
| My suggestion is literally that they _not_ unilaterally
| launch this across every region.
|
| > The position of the CMA is that other advertisers need
| 3p cookies but Google doesn't. [...] They will demand
| there to be some mechanism that gives small ad tech
| companies more data than FLOC did.
|
| I disagree with your connection of those two points.
| Google's job is to convince regulators that the removal
| of 3rd-party cookies won't advantage them. There are
| multiple ways they could attack that problem, including
| limiting the amount of data they collect. The UK's
| position is not that it is fundamentally important for
| advertisers to track users, the UK's position is that is
| important that there not be _one_ advertiser who can
| track users.
|
| It's particularly galling for Google to ignore this,
| because it assumes that of course Google can't possibly
| collect less information about its users or use less
| information in ad targeting, so the only solution is to
| make sure everyone else has the same amount of
| information as Google. But that's a false premise in my
| mind. I'm not advocating to remove 3rd-party cookies
| because I want Google to be the only entity that can
| target me; I would be perfectly happy if Google removed
| 3rd-party cookies _and_ committed to tracking me less to
| reduce its dominance in the market.
|
| In fact, I would argue that it would be better if Google
| went down that route. I don't trust Google any more than
| I trust any other 3rd-party advertiser; it's just as
| problematic for Google to be collecting this kind of
| invasive data. The assumption that Google's business
| model or data collection can't possibly change, and
| therefore we can't make any privacy improvements for
| anyone else... I just really strongly disagree with that
| idea.
|
| This is also true in the US. There are some probes
| happening in the US that cite cookie removal as a
| possible anti-competitive indicator. Notably, there are
| _other_ policies and actions that these probes cite that
| Google has not scrambled to avoid in the same way as it
| has for cookies. But whatever -- even in the US,
| regulators are not saying that advertisers need this
| information, they are saying it 's unacceptable for
| Google to have this large of a disparity with other
| competitors.
| tyingq wrote:
| Google is highly incented to do things like this where
| technically, it reduces Google's ability to track. But, it
| hurts other advertising companies more, so overall, it
| improves Google's position. Win-win-win of great PR, less
| anti-trust pressure, and broader gap to the next best
| competitor.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Google genuinely is trying to find a good path forward.
|
| Google is that earns 80% of its money from online ads.
| There's literally no incentive for Google to "find a good
| path forward".
| [deleted]
| jeffalo wrote:
| I am much happier with this system, but I don't really see how
| this would help Google.. Early web advertising used basic page
| topic based targeting, but clearly more targeted ads make more
| money, so what monetary benefit does this provide Google?
| mandevil wrote:
| I think the answer is that Apple killed 3rd party cookies on
| their browser- which includes every single website view from an
| iPhone, and Mozilla is working on the same thing. So Google,
| even with full control of Chrome, the most popular browser,
| could read the writing on the wall that 3rd party cookie
| tracking was on its way out. The adtech industry has responded
| so far in ways that undermine security completely- mostly
| trying to get their cookies counted as first party (which also
| means that their scripts can view the first party's data, e.g.
| they can steal your persistent log-in!).
|
| So Google has been trying to come up with something that Apple
| will let them get away with. Either give up on targeted
| advertising to iPhone/iPad users or come up with something
| better than third party cookies.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > that Apple will let them get away with
|
| Apple has no interest in supporting FLOC at all though right?
| iamben wrote:
| We're just going to end up back at contextual advertising
| again...
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