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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

> the end results are the same as before

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.

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Old: Google collected data, kept it on their servers, and sold advertising against that data. They don't ask permission, they don't let you black out categories you don't want to see advertising against. Nor do they (effectively) prevent malicious actors from using that advertising to sell content to manipulate people.

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.

If your problem is targeted advertising, then yes, this definitely isn't trying to solve that. The goal here is to solve your data being leaked all over the internet.

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.

You can’t attack the problems online advertising presents one by one, any solution needs to think about the other issues around it. It isn’t just about privacy.

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.

> The fact that without them, anyone other than large corporations would be entirely cut out of advertising their product

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.

Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies already. And advertisers won't stop using other fingerprinting techniques just because FLoC exists.

There is no new world. There is only the old world with more tracking. It’s not like FLOC magically removes existing tracking tools, or that not having it stops existing tracking reduction efforts.

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