I hope proposals like this are eventually accepted.
I think it's safe to assume that we are trending towards: people caring more about privacy, browser fingerprinting getting harder, VPNs being standard (e.g. thanks to Apple), and third party cookies for tracking are either prevented by major browsers or governments have legislated against them.
In that situation, at the end of the day, ads will still be here, and targeted ads are necessary for ads to be useful for both user and advertiser.
These measures, where your user agent says what ads would be useful to you, seem perfect to me. For the average user, they give just enough info to ad providers to not be invasive, and for someone who absolutely does not want that, they could likely turn an option on to give random topics.
Right now though, one can argue that this actually gives more data than before (i.e. tracking + topics instead of just tracking), but try to think about the situation in the future.
In the TV era, they weren't. Targeting in the TV era meant selecting a program and deriving from that what my interests are. Selecting channel == choosing web site.
That should be enough for advertisers, and then some.
> Right now though, one can argue that this actually gives more data than before (i.e. tracking + topics instead of just tracking), but try to think about the situation in the future.
Right. From a privacy perspetive, the goal obviously has to be to eliminate third-party cookies and various covert fingerprinting channels. That's what the whole "privacy sandbox" is about. Why does that proposal need to include a component for ad targeting? Because the other parts will be literally unlaunchable without that.
The German government, and by extension the EU, is pretty much controlled by the German media publishers. Whatever they want, they will get. They're even allowed to deploy the blatantly GDPR-violating "accept tracking, pay a subscription fee, or you can't read the article at all" consent dialogs, with zero repercussions. And what those publishers want is to continue tracking everyone with third-party cookies, to the extent that they are demanding the EU block Chrome from deprecating them[0]. If we want to kill third-party cookies, there must be some solution that even Axel Springer et al will have to concede is good enough.
Another day another behavioural ad vs contextual ad discussion. Hello! I'm going to copy paste one of my old comment on the topic here.
TLDR; Contextual ads are proactive and more effective than behavioural ads which depend on lucrative data economy and data selling to make it profitable.
---
The problem is not the ads but the way it is produced (Behavioral ads). The issue is always behavioural ads and not contextual ads. Duckduckgo has been profitable for so long with contextual ads. And not to mention, contextual ads which doesn't depend on lucrative data practices and privacy invasive tech has been proven to be much more effective than behavioural ads. Good read on it - [1][2].
Also, how is reactive ads (behavioural ads) useful to a user? Just think for a sec. Unless they are listening to everything you say which is ludicrous levels of privacy violation practice followed Google, FB and Amazon RIGHT NOW... behavioural ads are useless to many many topics and use cases. By the time you get a behaviour based ad, you would have stopped looking for it, found the item. And even when they are fast enough, after many hurdles of being reactionary, THE AD NEEDS TO APPEAL to the person. This again ignores the fact that users don't buy stuff based on behaviours but based on ratings and reviews from Yelp, Amazon, youtube reviewers and other influencing factors like ME! I am the tech nerd who helps my entire family and friends with purchases on electronic items like smartphones, computers and other items. And I know how to teach people to buy things by going through reviews and what not. Nothing I do is in favour of Behavioural ads. Meanwhile just by being proactive, contextual ads are more likely to be more appealing to user cos it depends on NOT YOUR BEHAVIOUR but behaviour of everyone who have searched the term/item. This means the ads are tested to work on more people IMO.
Also, behavioural ads miss the point that humans have strong opinions on things. But also that humans change their opinions from time to time. I might move from iOS to Android or vice versa. Behavioural ads also miss that a lot of the purchases are rare purchases and once in a life time purchases. So reactive ads based on my behaviour could be useless. Sure, you might be able to sell something based on this particular rare purchase. But why risk the resources wastage, data privacy and data breaches? This is not in favour of the user at all. Contextual ads are more effective in all the above scenarios than behavioural ads. Contextual ads also have the least baggage, risk and complexity compared to behavioural ads.
Behaviour data is not that effective to SELL ADS. But you can offset all these risks and ineffectiveness by selling your data to thousands of third parties or governments even. THE DATA ECONOMY MAKES BEHAVIOURAL ADS SUSTAINABLE. The data economy needs to stop. That is it. NOT ads. Ads have been present in media and everywhere else long before Google was there, nobody was up and arms about them, were they? They were annoying, yes. But not threatening like it is now.
There’s a couple of important things to note here.
First, the new Permissions-Policy: browsing-topics=() (or the old FLoC Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()) will ban this functionality, which is nice if you don’t want to leak your user’s data to Google for advertising purposes. I just checked and my site is still sending it so nothing to worry about here.
Secondly, the initial list of topics can be found at https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md . “/Finance/Grants, Scholarships & Financial Aid” is interestingly scary as a target group. They’re also weirdly American (“/Finance/Insurance/Health Insurance”, putting reggae under “World Music”, etc.)
Re: "weirdly American", I suspect that Google sourced the current topic list from an already existing list elsewhere. (Maybe the larger IAB list that is mentioned in the readme?) It seems unlikely Google would use some of these terms in the year of our Lord 2022. For instance, the category including the word "Shareware" seemed particularly turn of the millennium.
>> With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history.
Google's definition of what is a browser absolutely disgusts me. Please Firefox, Waterfox, Whateverfox, stay in the game for as long as you can because when you die, a piece of me will, too.
I find it the situation with Firefox and Google rather dire; Firefox seems to only be alive at this point because they receive annually $450 million USD from Google [1].
What happens when these payments disappears? Firefox is most definitely beholden to Google. Safari, seems to be the only real competitor right now, but again, Google is paying Apple ~$12 billion USD a year to be the default search engine there as well [2].
I know that the points I bring up relate to search engine dominance, but in a way, it extends much further than that. Firefox web browser is afloat solely because of these payments.
And that's where I stop reading. Now the software installed on my own devices is going to provide third-party sites with information about myself against my will?
Is it really against your will if you install and use an application that costs millions to develop, provided to the user at zero cost, made by the biggest advertisement and customer profiling company?
> More importantly, topics are thoughtfully curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race.
'Thoughtfully curated' by whom? The user or Google? This seems like it's less about privacy and more about advertising. I wonder if it would have been more honest to call it Advertising Sandbox?
> 'Thoughtfully curated' by whom? The user or Google?
As long as the base list is relatively short, published, and no other data is sent; it probably doesn't matter.
If it's a long list, or changes a lot, then the concern that "Recent Abortion" or "Transitioning" or "Pregnant" or "BLM Activist" or "Trump Supporter" or ... will start to drift into the list if it's valuable enough.
I've been thinking that something like topics is the actual solution for advertising so I'm not surprised that Google is trying to own this idea.
For instance, I think that if, by legislation, the publisher was allowed to send to the ad network three interest codes AND NO OTHER INFO, I'd be ok with that. I'd also be ok with a minor degree of localization (dma or metro).
The publishers could pick their three codes for all their users or, if they had some way of distinguishing "Sports Fan" from "Gaming Fan" IN THEIR OWN DATA they could send that (e.g. reddit would know my top three codes based on my subscriptions).
Then just eliminate tracking and monitoring, again by legislation.
Of course the list would have to be short, general and non intrusive.
In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away, advertisers get a single targeting method. The ad tech industry stops eating the world. Content becomes king again.
Google being in control of the codes, using their trove to choose the codes (in a suitable non-transparent mannter) while also reserving all that data for their own use is a huge problem.
I understand the idea here. Instead of having every website collect identifying behaviour through tracking and other forms of stalking, the browser provides the necessary information for ad companies to operate so it can work on blocking privacy invasions without nuking the data hoarder industries. This is probably in part because Google is in the ad business themselves and scummy ad companies could easily sue them for abusing their monopoly position if they just flat out blocked all data collection.
The end result is still terrible. The only upside I can think of is that if this mechanism does find use in browsers, it could allow users to specify what ads they want to see rather than have corporate guesswork shove that stuff down their throats, and it could allow Chrome forks to fake this information.
It's sad that the only real alternatives are Firefox, which has strange and unfathomable priorities, and Safari, which is held back by Apple's desire to make money off the app store (and their own bland of technical incompetence and bad policies). There was a brief moment where Microsoft Edge seemed like a great alternative to Chrome, with its new Spartan engine, but the past few months Microsoft has been ruining the likelihood I'll ever open it again with their terrible anti-features and even an integrated lure into debt.
YES. I love it. If Topics are simply determined by a user’s browsing history, perhaps loading a lot of junk in the background - or even manipulating Chrome’s history directly?
Just let me pick my own interests and then don't serve ads that insult those interests, like when I selected Atheism in my Facebook profile and then they advertised healing crystals to me.
It seems Google has the same problem: they can't understand that I know what I am interested in, and that is not "travel and transportation", but it might be reasonably priced used cars and that trip to Estonia.
Can I control the topics in my browser, or opt out completely?
In Chrome settings, you will be able to find which topics have been generated based on your browsing history. You will be able to block specific topics or opt out of the Privacy Sandbox technologies completely.
Walking a fine line here with regards to Art. 22 GDPR regarding automated decisions on behalf, and profiling of the individual [1].
This recent push of functionality that will make advertising look more private on the surface, another example of which is Edge's upcoming "Transparent Ads" [2] (whitelisted ads for trusted advertising partners), all of it merely prepwork for the day they sabotage ad blockers. The obvious next stage for them, after having successfully misdirected the narrative towards privacy being their primary use case.
Google must hate human beings, the shit they're pulling lately makes it obvious. So, Roko's basilisk... is this how it begins?
Quite a few sites do this today. The most notable being facebook with their 100+ div way of writing "Sponsored".
I don't see why google couldn't instruct site owners to self host doubleclick and apply some dynamic obfuscation for each visitor today. Surely not a law thing.
I imagine the same sort of automated profiling is going on behind closed doors at Google. If this is the thing that puts them in violation, i'm sure they'll think twice about making any more changes and APIs regarding their core business public.
Blegh, Google has to be pulled kicking and screaming towards a proposal where people actually control what information they share, inch by bloody inch. This is still just FLoC, just with slightly fewer awful bits and a different algorithm.
We had FLoC, where the browser determined topics behind the scenes and users had zero control over anything. Now we have "topics" or whatever, which is still FLoC, it's just that now users can view their topics and turn them off, which is better -- but the browser is still determining all of your information in the background and auto-sending this to lots of websites. They still don't understand what the criticism was.
----
I've made this same comment multiple times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558). I really do feel like there is something deeply systemically wrong with how Google thinks about user agency in regards to data/preferences.
I want to choose how I present online, and I want to be able to make that determination differently depending on the context. It's like saying that I want to choose what clothes I wear, and Google is saying, "okay, fine, we'll obviously still dress you, but if you don't like your shirt, you can tell us to change it, or you could even wear no clothes at all." No, get the heck out of my closet, I am capable of putting on my own clothes.
I don't want to just be able to hide some information about myself, I don't want to make a choice over whether or not I present at all by turning the feature on/off, I don't want to exclude certain categories that I'm embarrassed about, I don't want to have a single one-size-fits all identity that goes to every website, I don't want my browser to try and guess what my identity is, I don't want a browser-maker deciding what categories are and aren't sensitive to me, and I don't want to be forced to justify how I present or to guarantee that every piece of information I give to every advertiser is accurate.
I want to choose what (if any) persona I send to a website, on a website-by-website basis, and I want control over how that persona gets built, and I do not want that persona to change behind my back.
I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here, but to me this is not a hard concept to grasp. The Topics API provides additional safeguards around FLoC, but does not change the fundamental nature of what FLoC is. It does not give me control over how I present online, it doesn't take Google out of the equation.
And increasingly it seems that Google is just totally incapable of building a feature that gives me autonomy over anything without them stepping into the process. When Google builds a dressing room/wardrobe, they need to be inside the dressing room while I change. They have to be a third wheel in this process. They need to have some pointless AI process running to make sure everyone knows their engineers are smart, or some pointless fiddling phase where my interests change every week so that everyone knows that Google was important to this process. I hate that they are incapable of stepping out of the dressing room and letting me heckin dress myself.
> I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here
The conceptual divide is that Google cares nothing about individuals' perspectives. To them it's not a user-agent, but rather a corporate-agent. Rather than producing software that represents users interests, users are treated as surveillance feedstock to be monitored and exploited contrary to their best interests.
This is the same theme as when their snake oil "security" requests you jump through hoops despite you having entered your longstanding secure password - they're talking about their security rather than yours. The same theme as when they relegate you to robosupport hell. The same theme as when they show you endless CAPTCHA images because your browsing setup has not leaked enough information about you to satisfy their surveillance collection. The same theme as why they don't allow you to set a billing limit for Google Cloud. The same theme as why they deprecate an older product because it doesn't fit their org chart. The same theme when they throw yet another monolithic dump of Android over the wall and consign millions of advanced technological devices to becoming e-waste.
This is of course a common perspective held by any large corporation, but Google is especially bad as their business was not built around receiving revenue from users directly. Rather they only profit by doing what they do "at scale", and that scale is large enough to make it so any individual simply does not matter.
[+] [-] zebracanevra|4 years ago|reply
I think it's safe to assume that we are trending towards: people caring more about privacy, browser fingerprinting getting harder, VPNs being standard (e.g. thanks to Apple), and third party cookies for tracking are either prevented by major browsers or governments have legislated against them.
In that situation, at the end of the day, ads will still be here, and targeted ads are necessary for ads to be useful for both user and advertiser.
These measures, where your user agent says what ads would be useful to you, seem perfect to me. For the average user, they give just enough info to ad providers to not be invasive, and for someone who absolutely does not want that, they could likely turn an option on to give random topics.
Right now though, one can argue that this actually gives more data than before (i.e. tracking + topics instead of just tracking), but try to think about the situation in the future.
(I'll still block ads.)
[+] [-] kreeben|4 years ago|reply
In the TV era, they weren't. Targeting in the TV era meant selecting a program and deriving from that what my interests are. Selecting channel == choosing web site.
That should be enough for advertisers, and then some.
[+] [-] Rygian|4 years ago|reply
> (I'll still block ads.)
You have shot down the argumentative line of your whole comment with that last line.
[+] [-] jsnell|4 years ago|reply
Right. From a privacy perspetive, the goal obviously has to be to eliminate third-party cookies and various covert fingerprinting channels. That's what the whole "privacy sandbox" is about. Why does that proposal need to include a component for ad targeting? Because the other parts will be literally unlaunchable without that.
The German government, and by extension the EU, is pretty much controlled by the German media publishers. Whatever they want, they will get. They're even allowed to deploy the blatantly GDPR-violating "accept tracking, pay a subscription fee, or you can't read the article at all" consent dialogs, with zero repercussions. And what those publishers want is to continue tracking everyone with third-party cookies, to the extent that they are demanding the EU block Chrome from deprecating them[0]. If we want to kill third-party cookies, there must be some solution that even Axel Springer et al will have to concede is good enough.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/eccf5514-8b83-4d85-8305-f882adf5d...
[+] [-] stiray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gentil|4 years ago|reply
Another day another behavioural ad vs contextual ad discussion. Hello! I'm going to copy paste one of my old comment on the topic here.
TLDR; Contextual ads are proactive and more effective than behavioural ads which depend on lucrative data economy and data selling to make it profitable.
---
The problem is not the ads but the way it is produced (Behavioral ads). The issue is always behavioural ads and not contextual ads. Duckduckgo has been profitable for so long with contextual ads. And not to mention, contextual ads which doesn't depend on lucrative data practices and privacy invasive tech has been proven to be much more effective than behavioural ads. Good read on it - [1][2].
Also, how is reactive ads (behavioural ads) useful to a user? Just think for a sec. Unless they are listening to everything you say which is ludicrous levels of privacy violation practice followed Google, FB and Amazon RIGHT NOW... behavioural ads are useless to many many topics and use cases. By the time you get a behaviour based ad, you would have stopped looking for it, found the item. And even when they are fast enough, after many hurdles of being reactionary, THE AD NEEDS TO APPEAL to the person. This again ignores the fact that users don't buy stuff based on behaviours but based on ratings and reviews from Yelp, Amazon, youtube reviewers and other influencing factors like ME! I am the tech nerd who helps my entire family and friends with purchases on electronic items like smartphones, computers and other items. And I know how to teach people to buy things by going through reviews and what not. Nothing I do is in favour of Behavioural ads. Meanwhile just by being proactive, contextual ads are more likely to be more appealing to user cos it depends on NOT YOUR BEHAVIOUR but behaviour of everyone who have searched the term/item. This means the ads are tested to work on more people IMO.
Also, behavioural ads miss the point that humans have strong opinions on things. But also that humans change their opinions from time to time. I might move from iOS to Android or vice versa. Behavioural ads also miss that a lot of the purchases are rare purchases and once in a life time purchases. So reactive ads based on my behaviour could be useless. Sure, you might be able to sell something based on this particular rare purchase. But why risk the resources wastage, data privacy and data breaches? This is not in favour of the user at all. Contextual ads are more effective in all the above scenarios than behavioural ads. Contextual ads also have the least baggage, risk and complexity compared to behavioural ads.
Behaviour data is not that effective to SELL ADS. But you can offset all these risks and ineffectiveness by selling your data to thousands of third parties or governments even. THE DATA ECONOMY MAKES BEHAVIOURAL ADS SUSTAINABLE. The data economy needs to stop. That is it. NOT ads. Ads have been present in media and everywhere else long before Google was there, nobody was up and arms about them, were they? They were annoying, yes. But not threatening like it is now.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook-google-p...
[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
[+] [-] iamacyborg|4 years ago|reply
Citation needed.
[+] [-] robin_reala|4 years ago|reply
First, the new Permissions-Policy: browsing-topics=() (or the old FLoC Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()) will ban this functionality, which is nice if you don’t want to leak your user’s data to Google for advertising purposes. I just checked and my site is still sending it so nothing to worry about here.
Secondly, the initial list of topics can be found at https://github.com/jkarlin/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md . “/Finance/Grants, Scholarships & Financial Aid” is interestingly scary as a target group. They’re also weirdly American (“/Finance/Insurance/Health Insurance”, putting reggae under “World Music”, etc.)
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kreeben|4 years ago|reply
Google's definition of what is a browser absolutely disgusts me. Please Firefox, Waterfox, Whateverfox, stay in the game for as long as you can because when you die, a piece of me will, too.
[+] [-] gzer0|4 years ago|reply
I know that the points I bring up relate to search engine dominance, but in a way, it extends much further than that. Firefox web browser is afloat solely because of these payments.
[1] https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/08/mozilla-firefox-goo... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...
[+] [-] Rygian|4 years ago|reply
And that's where I stop reading. Now the software installed on my own devices is going to provide third-party sites with information about myself against my will?
[+] [-] gkbrk|4 years ago|reply
Is it really against your will if you install and use an application that costs millions to develop, provided to the user at zero cost, made by the biggest advertisement and customer profiling company?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrischapman|4 years ago|reply
'Thoughtfully curated' by whom? The user or Google? This seems like it's less about privacy and more about advertising. I wonder if it would have been more honest to call it Advertising Sandbox?
[+] [-] yunohn|4 years ago|reply
FTA, they're very clear about it being for advertising; just also with privacy in mind.
[+] [-] Ensorceled|4 years ago|reply
As long as the base list is relatively short, published, and no other data is sent; it probably doesn't matter.
If it's a long list, or changes a lot, then the concern that "Recent Abortion" or "Transitioning" or "Pregnant" or "BLM Activist" or "Trump Supporter" or ... will start to drift into the list if it's valuable enough.
[+] [-] Ensorceled|4 years ago|reply
For instance, I think that if, by legislation, the publisher was allowed to send to the ad network three interest codes AND NO OTHER INFO, I'd be ok with that. I'd also be ok with a minor degree of localization (dma or metro).
The publishers could pick their three codes for all their users or, if they had some way of distinguishing "Sports Fan" from "Gaming Fan" IN THEIR OWN DATA they could send that (e.g. reddit would know my top three codes based on my subscriptions).
Then just eliminate tracking and monitoring, again by legislation.
Of course the list would have to be short, general and non intrusive.
In one fell swoop all the tracking cookies go away, advertisers get a single targeting method. The ad tech industry stops eating the world. Content becomes king again.
Google being in control of the codes, using their trove to choose the codes (in a suitable non-transparent mannter) while also reserving all that data for their own use is a huge problem.
[+] [-] kreeben|4 years ago|reply
... and in their place, instead of blockable cookies, we'll have something much more nefarious. Un-escapable advertisements.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
The end result is still terrible. The only upside I can think of is that if this mechanism does find use in browsers, it could allow users to specify what ads they want to see rather than have corporate guesswork shove that stuff down their throats, and it could allow Chrome forks to fake this information.
It's sad that the only real alternatives are Firefox, which has strange and unfathomable priorities, and Safari, which is held back by Apple's desire to make money off the app store (and their own bland of technical incompetence and bad policies). There was a brief moment where Microsoft Edge seemed like a great alternative to Chrome, with its new Spartan engine, but the past few months Microsoft has been ruining the likelihood I'll ever open it again with their terrible anti-features and even an integrated lure into debt.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ohCh6zos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelandfe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|4 years ago|reply
It seems Google has the same problem: they can't understand that I know what I am interested in, and that is not "travel and transportation", but it might be reasonably priced used cars and that trip to Estonia.
[+] [-] archerx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doopy1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alkonaut|4 years ago|reply
What are the odds of other fingerprinting and tracking techniques being dropped though?
[+] [-] radiKal07|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|4 years ago|reply
Can I control the topics in my browser, or opt out completely?
In Chrome settings, you will be able to find which topics have been generated based on your browsing history. You will be able to block specific topics or opt out of the Privacy Sandbox technologies completely.
[+] [-] krono|4 years ago|reply
This recent push of functionality that will make advertising look more private on the surface, another example of which is Edge's upcoming "Transparent Ads" [2] (whitelisted ads for trusted advertising partners), all of it merely prepwork for the day they sabotage ad blockers. The obvious next stage for them, after having successfully misdirected the narrative towards privacy being their primary use case.
Google must hate human beings, the shit they're pulling lately makes it obvious. So, Roko's basilisk... is this how it begins?
1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ 2 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-...
[+] [-] no_time|4 years ago|reply
Quite a few sites do this today. The most notable being facebook with their 100+ div way of writing "Sponsored".
I don't see why google couldn't instruct site owners to self host doubleclick and apply some dynamic obfuscation for each visitor today. Surely not a law thing.
[+] [-] judge2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_time|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danShumway|4 years ago|reply
We had FLoC, where the browser determined topics behind the scenes and users had zero control over anything. Now we have "topics" or whatever, which is still FLoC, it's just that now users can view their topics and turn them off, which is better -- but the browser is still determining all of your information in the background and auto-sending this to lots of websites. They still don't understand what the criticism was.
----
I've made this same comment multiple times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28212558). I really do feel like there is something deeply systemically wrong with how Google thinks about user agency in regards to data/preferences.
I want to choose how I present online, and I want to be able to make that determination differently depending on the context. It's like saying that I want to choose what clothes I wear, and Google is saying, "okay, fine, we'll obviously still dress you, but if you don't like your shirt, you can tell us to change it, or you could even wear no clothes at all." No, get the heck out of my closet, I am capable of putting on my own clothes.
I don't want to just be able to hide some information about myself, I don't want to make a choice over whether or not I present at all by turning the feature on/off, I don't want to exclude certain categories that I'm embarrassed about, I don't want to have a single one-size-fits all identity that goes to every website, I don't want my browser to try and guess what my identity is, I don't want a browser-maker deciding what categories are and aren't sensitive to me, and I don't want to be forced to justify how I present or to guarantee that every piece of information I give to every advertiser is accurate.
I want to choose what (if any) persona I send to a website, on a website-by-website basis, and I want control over how that persona gets built, and I do not want that persona to change behind my back.
I feel like there is some huge conceptual divide here, but to me this is not a hard concept to grasp. The Topics API provides additional safeguards around FLoC, but does not change the fundamental nature of what FLoC is. It does not give me control over how I present online, it doesn't take Google out of the equation.
And increasingly it seems that Google is just totally incapable of building a feature that gives me autonomy over anything without them stepping into the process. When Google builds a dressing room/wardrobe, they need to be inside the dressing room while I change. They have to be a third wheel in this process. They need to have some pointless AI process running to make sure everyone knows their engineers are smart, or some pointless fiddling phase where my interests change every week so that everyone knows that Google was important to this process. I hate that they are incapable of stepping out of the dressing room and letting me heckin dress myself.
[+] [-] mindslight|4 years ago|reply
The conceptual divide is that Google cares nothing about individuals' perspectives. To them it's not a user-agent, but rather a corporate-agent. Rather than producing software that represents users interests, users are treated as surveillance feedstock to be monitored and exploited contrary to their best interests.
This is the same theme as when their snake oil "security" requests you jump through hoops despite you having entered your longstanding secure password - they're talking about their security rather than yours. The same theme as when they relegate you to robosupport hell. The same theme as when they show you endless CAPTCHA images because your browsing setup has not leaked enough information about you to satisfy their surveillance collection. The same theme as why they don't allow you to set a billing limit for Google Cloud. The same theme as why they deprecate an older product because it doesn't fit their org chart. The same theme when they throw yet another monolithic dump of Android over the wall and consign millions of advanced technological devices to becoming e-waste.
This is of course a common perspective held by any large corporation, but Google is especially bad as their business was not built around receiving revenue from users directly. Rather they only profit by doing what they do "at scale", and that scale is large enough to make it so any individual simply does not matter.
[+] [-] marvinblum|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syrrim|4 years ago|reply