I have been reading up on Chrome’s new Topics API and FLoC. Can someone explain to me why it is bad? Do the negatives of FLoC also apply to Federated Learning? (I’m not saying that FLoC is good, I’m just confused.)
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I think this is a pretty good breakdown and worth a read. Some key takeaways are that with FLoC Google would be able to track visitors to your website even if you were not using Google Analytics, and that the mechanism is built-in the Chrome browser so entirely controlled by Google.
Here is a related article about Topics, the FLoC replacement.
Vivaldi removed it from Chromium more than 2 years ago, just like before and after all of Google’s other dirty tricks to track and profile users. No serious browser, Vivaldi, Firefox or Mozilla forks, will enter the Google game.
@tester1121 so you can rest assured (as long as you don’t use Chrome or EDGE or search with Google)
https://vivaldi.com/blog/no-google-vivaldi-users-will-not-get-floced/
It’s yet another scheme to gather data about Chrome users for the benefit of advertisers. Aside from the fundamental problems with that whole idea which people most often point to, it’s also underhanded in a way that cookies, tracking scripts, and browser fingerprinting aren’t: It’s code that’s built in to the web browser itself which exists for no purpose other than to act directly against the interests of its users. It may be the first time that’s happened in such an obvious and unambiguous way.
Federated learning as a machine learning topic is unrelated to floc afaict.
The issue I have with things like FloC and the topics API are that they are attempts to keep the cash flowing at Google before disabling 3rd party cookies, when it seems obvious that the time to disable 3rd party cookies is now.
So the features on my Pixel that use federated learning don’t share the same privacy risks as FLoC?
I think not? I’m sure it still comes with some privacy risks, plus your phone is using power you paid for to train models owned by someone else I believe. What features are you thinking of? Lol I use a pixel as well
All you need to know is its a proposal by Google for a new web standard. Enough said.
from my experience the description of what this is by google itself is confusing and/or misleading, so be wary
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I have a lot of questions about your comment. Forgive me if I misinterpreted what you meant. Also, I’m not the person you responded to, just FYI.
Gathering data on people is Google’s business, so what do you mean by this? Topics is still going to gather information; if anything, it accelerates data harvesting, because all of that tracking information has to be decoded at a hub – which, of course, will be Google. So what do you mean by that statement?
… and then shared with the websites you visit. It doesn’t stop web sites from profiling browsers, and the cohort can be used to drastically reduce the set of possible users and pinpont an individual. How is that not “tracking cookies 2.0?” Any information a tracker can get about you, including your cohort ID, improves identification algorithm results.
It’s even worse than cookies, because fundamentally it’s profiling. And when the data leaks happen, it’ll be lists of people lumped together however tenuously with other people, regardless of their real interest. If you thought the Ashly Madison breach wreaked marital havok, wait until the first data breach where perfectly innocent people are lumped into a cohort that also happens to strongly feature visitors to Grindr.
We agree that Google is a wellspring of horribly invasive, privacy-violating technologies; I just don’t understand why you feel this one is different, or overstated. The strong (and technical) responses from Mozilla and the EFF are a good bellweather for things like this.