It's that sort of stuff that fuels some of the more pronounced objections, I suspect. It's what fuels mine.
Edit: I'm still bad at HN formatting.
Except it's not. In the old world, advertisers literally track you around the web and gather data about every single website you've visited, how long you've spent there, and so on.
In the new world, they basically just get an anonymized "group" you belong to that roughly gives them what you're interested in. They wouldn't know who you are or anything else about you, just that your in group 8123 and that group happens to generally visit a lot of websites related to fishing.
Now: Exactly the same, only Google uses your hard drive to store the data.
There are some privacy issues addressed by this, but it doesn't address many of the issues with personalized targeting.
It's neat when you are talking about things like fishing, but targeted advertising has also been used in multiple countries to manipulate elections by outside governments. It's also been used to out gay people and racist marketing.
We can have an entirely separate discussion on whether the value of targeted ads. You named a few downside but are completely ignoring the upsides. The fact that without them, anyone other than large corporations would be entirely cut out of advertising their product. Any small business or creator with a niche demographic is basically screwed.
If you make an app for some video game, a cure for some specific disease, gear for a specific sport, all those people would basically be locked out of advertising their products.
If there was a reasonable sized white list of fairly harmless “interests”, then maybe. The way things are now, interest groups are too fine grained and far too personal.
I’m not convinced at all that granting small businesses access to this kind of targeted advertising is worth the risks it introduces.
I don't follow your premise.
Big ad networks and targeting make advertising slicker, but that's different from making it possible at all.
In the world of Google ads and targeted profiles, you ask for demographic units, and buy a handful of impressions on a thousand random sites that you've been promised are to relevant viewers.
Without profiling, you'd have to focus on where you want the ads to appear-- either by negotiation with individual publishers, or using an ad network that lets you select publishers by category or requesting page-level keyword matches.
The user realizes no "improvement" here at all. The bottom line is that 3rd party cookies were being successfully blocked --- and for good reasons --- so Google built a workaround --- which is now being blocked too.
The apparent plan being that most users are clueless lemmings who will continue to use Google Chrome --- for no good reason. Stupidity gets exploited --- a universal law of commerce.
So it's a new technology, with new complexity, and unknown additional attack surface (in the sense of attacks on user privacy) that doesn't do anything to actually reduce the tracking of users.
The system under FLoC means they don't see anything about you and which site you've visited, they only get a single cohort ID, which is group roughly representing your browsing behavior.
How are these the same?
My further understanding is that FLoC IDs will be available to any website. So even if you’re too small to run a global tracking network, you can grab the FLoC ID from any visitor and, assuming that decoding services exist, turn that into useful data instantly.
3rd party cookies aren't part of the status quo. Safari and Firefox block them already.
Why is that so hard that we give up and accept tech companies ignoring people's freedom and liberty to choose not to be tracked?
The article title contains the word "everybody" which is evidence of the authors tendency to deal in absolutes. He is claiming to speak for us all with this loose assimilation of words ("hates" further describes an emotional disposition towards idea proposal, and the tagline is equally charming). Let's make it our mission to be polite for a cleaner archive of Internet Interaction Instances. I will not match the negative energy and instead proceed to be cordial&calculated in the delivery of my opinion (I lost sleep over this last night).
Thiel on Weinstein's "Portal" ventured the "eye of Sauron" metaphor [0] to describe the effect of surveillance on generations developing during the Information Age. The "double-slit experiment" is also relevant here (modern scientific lore suggesting that the act of observation influences outcome - "spooky action"). Tolkien and Wagner both constructed epic "entertainment" sagas that describe elaborate human feud because of a "golden ring of power". Both of these works were written after the Industrial Age had fully (quickly) propelled civilization into a new form, with recent regional warfare fresh in the memories of the aforementioned authors (Wagner would have monitored Franco-Prussian conflict, Tolkien personally participated in the Somme).
The Völsunga saga could be considered the first instance of the same story ("... the ring Andvaranaut serves as a connection and explanation for the characters' troubles." [1] Fafnir turning into a dragon to protect the gold is just a metaphor for the military prowess of an organized fiefdom). Gold exchanging hands to influence the toil of entire populations goes back as far as Egyptian recognition of its malleability, ease of extraction, and resemblance to the Sun.
With Tolkien's childhood propensity for secrecy, enthusiasm for cryptoanalysis, and concern of the postal censorship of his wartime subordinates - it makes sense that he would associate a gold object with "invisibility", that is, anonymity. The "eye of Sauron" will only notice you if you've revealed your desire to move undetected among the ones that operate in your shared civilization. This results in the curse of a painfully long life and a corruption of an isolated mind (Gollum). Your enemy then becomes the people (Nazgul) who have already succumbed to this lust for amplification of their might because of the same "magical" inanimate object. Marvel's Thanos ring-adorned-gauntlet is the recently installed update of the same concept.
What does this have to do with the Federated Learning of Cohorts?
A single search request "cost" 7-10 grams of carbon emission in 2009 [2]. Running your computer or progressively chewing up the limited battery lifetime of your smartphone to locate something on the internet for "free" costs carbon output at some point in a transmission pathway. Soft/hardware engineers will reduce this footprint over time through clever organization of their employers' assets, but nothing is "free". You owe it to society to have your anonymized meta-interests understood&catalogued by the hand that feeds you a conveniently "free" Ranked Page of relevant information (digitally posted efforts of others automatically crawled). The pinnacle of modern technology is in your pocket (at a cost reduced on purpose so everyone can input their thoughts) - but you don't want to share your self with the world? A flock of various cohorts feeding the hive-mind with their intent is supposed to be valuable because this information can eventually generate paychecks and subsidies meant to satisfy the flock's apparent needs (or guide it away from corrosive wants). Regulated Money flow (not gold, aka invisibility) is meant to be documented so that a society can sort itself out.
Perhaps you are resisting FLoC because of distrust in who is pulling the levers? If your paranoia is valid, then the problem will be naturally solved by internal resolution ("Et tu, Brute?").
I am a node in the hive-mind with a duty to transmit new information as soon as it is discovered. Even if it's wrong - at least I said something. I am an open book and entertainer of an open source society.
"I don't care that they stole my idea... I care that they don't have any of their own." - Nikola Tesla
[0] https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s?t=9870
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga
[2] https://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-carbon-footprin...