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yunohn

It’s literally a cohort ID? Where did you get “hands them your browsing history on a silver platter” from?

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because combined with browser fingerprinting it is exactly the outcome

https://amiunique.org/

"Yes! You are unique among the 3387629 fingerprints in our entire dataset."

Browser fingerprinting already works fine without FLoC.

That site seems to be pretty buggy. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ has more visitors and seems to have a wider collection.

With Safari on macOS I get a score of ~1/8500. Not amazing, but certainly not catastrophic.

It turns out my browser is unique just based on the http_accept header alone. How the heck did we end up in that situation?

It's similar to Spectre. We had more pressing issues back then. As those issues are solved, we moved to more tricky ones which did not get much attention before.

You're going to drive yourself crazy if you try to make sense of "privacy"-advocate objections on an object level. It's not actually about privacy. No matter how much FLoC or something FLoC-like preserves your actual privacy, advocates will be against it. That's because they don't actually care about privacy and have always used concerns about "privacy" as a pretext for killing ads.

Fingerprinting is hardly just advertising.

Then fix fingerprinting. "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.

True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point.

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.

> True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point.

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?

There are no specifications about what the cohorts will be, Google is literally leaving that for the ad companies to figure it out. It wouldnt be suprising it at all they realize a way to make small enough cohorts in such a way you can be fingerprinted.

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!)

> So why is it bad?

Because it effectively exposes your browsing history. If privacy is a concern that's not something you want.

> Then fix fingerprinting.

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.

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