I have been reading up on Chrome’s new Topics API and FLoC. Can someone explain to me why it is bad? Do the negatives of FLoC also apply to Federated Learning? (I’m not saying that FLoC is good, I’m just confused.)
I have been reading up on Chrome’s new Topics API and FLoC. Can someone explain to me why it is bad? Do the negatives of FLoC also apply to Federated Learning? (I’m not saying that FLoC is good, I’m just confused.)
As if governments are going to allow that. Google is already being investigated for their plans to disable third party cookies by other advertisers. That’s part of the reason why they’re doing this anyway. The rest of the ad industry has gathered behind their own standard, which is much more invasive. The British CMA has stepped in to make sure Google doesn’t remove first party cookies too soon, because that would impede other advertisers.
Google wants to get rid of a large part of their data gathering system because collecting all of that data is a huge business risk, up to 4% of global revenue under the GDPR, but if they were to disable third party cookies tomorrow, they’d get fined to hell and back by antitrust lawsuits.
I don’t really get why it’s “Tracking Cookies 2.0”. Data is stored and analysed locally and, from a technology point of view, allows for user customisation. Chrome doesn’t offer that customisation beyond offering the user the ability to remove a detected topic (get it together, Google!) but I can’t say I can see that much of a problem with giving websites a 33% chance of learning that I like computer technology.
This is not to be confused with Unified ID, an attempt to standardise invasive tracking procedures, using PII as a source for generating identifiers. This includes “normalisation” of email addresses (so turning john.doe+tiktok@gmail.com into john.doe@gmail.com to bypass people trying to find out who’s selling their email address).
There are other Google technologies that are much worse; remote attestation of Javascript, for example, which is already in use in Safari, though it’s not as bad as Google’s proposal. The design and UX of Chrome’s FLoC implementation is also pretty shit. However, I think the privacy impact of the new system is drastically overstated.
I have a lot of questions about your comment. Forgive me if I misinterpreted what you meant. Also, I’m not the person you responded to, just FYI.
Gathering data on people is Google’s business, so what do you mean by this? Topics is still going to gather information; if anything, it accelerates data harvesting, because all of that tracking information has to be decoded at a hub – which, of course, will be Google. So what do you mean by that statement?
… and then shared with the websites you visit. It doesn’t stop web sites from profiling browsers, and the cohort can be used to drastically reduce the set of possible users and pinpont an individual. How is that not “tracking cookies 2.0?” Any information a tracker can get about you, including your cohort ID, improves identification algorithm results.
It’s even worse than cookies, because fundamentally it’s profiling. And when the data leaks happen, it’ll be lists of people lumped together however tenuously with other people, regardless of their real interest. If you thought the Ashly Madison breach wreaked marital havok, wait until the first data breach where perfectly innocent people are lumped into a cohort that also happens to strongly feature visitors to Grindr.
We agree that Google is a wellspring of horribly invasive, privacy-violating technologies; I just don’t understand why you feel this one is different, or overstated. The strong (and technical) responses from Mozilla and the EFF are a good bellweather for things like this.