No one wants to consent to being spied on, so FLoC is circumnavigating the GDPR consent requirements, letting them spy on all Chrome-users without consent.
Not sure why it is supposed to be significant improvement.
"FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However [a tracker now] only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million). In information theoretic terms, FLoC cohorts will contain several bits of entropy—up to 8 bits, in Google’s proof of concept trial. This information is even more potent given that it is unlikely to be correlated with other information that the browser exposes. This will make it much easier for trackers to put together a unique fingerprint for FLoC users."
"as your FLoC cohort will update over time, sites that can identify you in other ways will also be able to track how your browsing changes [...] a FLoC cohort is nothing more, and nothing less, than a summary of your recent browsing activity."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
Your FLOC cohort is a summary of your web browsing activity. FLOC doesn't solve the privacy problems that trackers create - it just hands them your browsing history on a silver platter.
"Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset."
Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.
With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.
Id gladly pay for my content just to watch the ad-tech industry die, its not just about "ads", they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
But why?
> they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
But FLoC is explicitly about doing ads in a way that does not lead to a "surveillance police state". So why is it bad?
The bottom line is that you are giving them your browsing data, obfuscated by fancy algorithms. Unless you trust ad-tech to have the best interests about your privacy (ha!)
Because it effectively exposes your browsing history. If privacy is a concern that's not something you want.
Yeah, working on it.
> "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.
It isn’t though.
So to be clear, "Big Ad" is like, dentsu, Publicis, Omnicom, etc. Companies that don't show up on HN much (but do ultimately buy the services which pay a ton of HNer's salaries).
They don't like Google very much, but Google owns a ton of space to put ads on, lots of first-party traffic with interesting properties, and more accurate targeting models than most other companies combined. So they have to work together. Real Big Ad would all rather keep the third-party cookie and not have to deal with FLoC, because they know they're already trapped in dealing with Google based on market demands, and FLoC will give Google even more forceful technical leverage.
If you view the market through only this lens it becomes very easy for partisan interests (e.g. Brave, just as much an advertising company as Google) to trick you. Google is notable for how disintegrated it is from the rest of the ad business, between its technology monopolies and vertical integrations.