Comment by sha666sum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sha666sum | Hacker News Reader

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I left out of my comment that there's significant overlap between users who block cookies and those who use adblockers. Many users simply don't want to see ads, but are subject to intrusive tracking nevertheless.

However, you are right that most people would probably be fine with personalized ads if it was possible to show them without identifiable tracking.

Personalizing content without identifiable tracking is a really hard issue that I'll be surprised if anyone ever manages to solve. It will also most likely involve some compromises that hurt Google's bottom line, so I think the financial incentives just aren't there for them. Given those two assumptions and Google's track record, I think it's absurd to assume that any standard they create will meaningfully improve user privacy.

Also, I fear their new standards would most likely just circumvent the tools available for users to avoid tracking, as the tracking would be baked into the browser itself.

What gets me is that you can very easily have personalized ads just by showing an ad relevant to the content on the current page.

There's no need for harvesting any data on the user, or tracking them across sites in this case.

This, is, indeed, a big part of Duck Duck Go's business model: showing you ads that are related to what you just searched for.

This isn't a foreign concept, either. It's how everyone started out. Google just thought they could charge more for ads if they also began tracking users so they could display higher-value ads that are supposedly relevant to a user regardless of the content of the page they are on. It turns out that they were right, and they are able to make more money doing this. Unfortunately for the rest of us, privacy is collateral damage.

Those are valid concerns, though at first glance it doesn't seem to me like any of Google's actual proposals[1] have those issues. In fact, FloC seems like a rather promising way to achieve "personalizing content without identifiable tracking". Perhaps that particular problem isn't as hard as you thought?

[1]: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

Floc is still a surveillance machinery that comes with the usual bells and whistles like mass propaganda and behaviour control. They admit to as much in the concerns section of the readme.

No it isn't; that's ridiculous.

The concerns section explains that broad interest categories (traits shared with thousands of other people) are revealed to ad networks. That's it. No "surveillance machinery", nor is there any mention of "mass propaganda and behaviour control".

And I quote

> A flock could be used as a user identifier. It may not have enough bits of information to individually identify someone, but in combination with other information (such as an IP address), it might.

...

> A flock might reveal sensitive information. As a first mitigation, the browser should remove sensitive categories from its data collection. But this does not mean sensitive information can’t be leaked. Some people are sensitive to categories that others are not, and there is no globally accepted notion of sensitive categories.

...

> This API democratizes access to some information about an individual’s general browsing history (and thus, general interests) to any site that opts into the header. This is in contrast to today’s world, in which cookies or other tracking techniques may be used to collate someone’s browsing activity across many sites.

> Sites that know a person’s PII (e.g., when people sign in using their email address) could record and reveal their flock. This means that information about an individual's interests may eventually become public. This is not ideal, but still better than today’s situation in which PII can be joined to exact browsing history obtained via third-party cookies.

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