Obviously Google does it for self interested reasons, but thank goodness they do - you can hate Google and targeted ads all you want but without Google pushing web and ad tech forward it would stand little chance against the competing proprietary platforms.
Your suggestion that Google pay sites for the traffic they generate should like that ridiculous News Corp/Australian shakedown of Facebook and Google, which people were only able to justify based on their hatred of the target companies and a willingness to sacrifice the web to their ends.
Little chance of what. It sounds like this is framing the web as some sort of commercial venture. And Google is the gatekeeper. A venture where they can effectively make sites "appear" or "disappear" from the web and they decide what the public will or not see. Google watches the traffic, shows what is "popular" and buries the rest. Everyone begs for Google's favour to show their site "at the top, on page one". If not an organic listing, then Google will let anyone pay to be "at the top, on page one" in the form of an ad that looks much like a search result.
That's a very dysfunctional "public platform". (The Google founders wrote about how dysfunctional it was to sell out that way in their 1998 paper announcing their new, alternative search engine.) No one ever agreed the only way the "public platform" would be useful is for a few big corporations to control it. That is a recent idea held only by those who stand to (continue to) benefit from its realisation.
News Corp is bad, Google is bad, Facebook is bad, but c'mon this does not mean the web has to be bad. If one cannot see the difference between "the web" and a few big corporations, then some "reframing" is defintely in order. The web is a medium not a destination. Google, Facebook and others trying to emulate them are all acting as middlemen on the medium.
Garbage like AMP, or flexing their dominance in the search market to force websites to comply with this or that or risk delisting, is garbage.
Citation needed. What proprietary platforms would have taken hold if not for the grace of gmail?
> Your suggestion that Google pay sites for the traffic they generate should (sic.) like that ridiculous News Corp/Australian shakedown of Facebook and Google
Facebook is complying: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/facebook-to-lift-a... because hey, sharing the pot is better than no pot.
I think the point is that nobody would go to Google if they didn't need to look something up on Wikipedia. So while Google helps users discover content and funnel them towards sites, Google would be 100% useless without the content that ultimately drives the traffic. The status quo, where Google lays 100% claim to the traffic and gets to control monetization, is frankly not in anybody's interest. So why should we accept it?
While I agree with you that Google paying for serving requests or some other equity mechanism sounds just plain odd, there are few tools to deal with multinational monopolies. Tesla is making bank right now in no small part from carbon offsets and consumer tax benefits—- that’s all because Aramco and big oil won’t diverge from their shareholder interests. Google usually welcomes novel web/social mechanisms and it’s very telling when they so thoroughly refute the interests of news sites. Or try to solve the problem with something crappy like AMP.
To give some evidence for this, Google pushed hard for PWAs - it serves their interests since they can focus on one platform for their desktop platforms, but also means that on Desktop (via Chrome) and Android each web app can just install themselves without having to distribute a native package or go through an app store.
True, as are some of the counterpoints. I don't think it contradicts OP's point though. FLoC is designed by Google, for Google's needs. Some/most of those are genuinely privacy related, the way that they're related is via advertising/targeting/tracking... which Google rely on for all their revenue.
Amazon, meanwhile, doesn't benefit from FloC much... hence conflict.
These datasets are being used as defining advantages by both companies. Why should amazon want to adopt/feed google's new analytics project?
My understanding was Google works a ton on open source and essentially making "the internet" better so that people will ultimately use Google more (since Google is the backbone of the internet) and therefore consume more ads.
All of these tech advancements definitely helps the world more than it helps Google but I'm failing to know why/how FLoC helps the community more than it does Google? Not saying Google is in the wrong to do things out of self-interest, but this scenario is a little different
> make such huge investments in the one public platform we've got
How are things like AMP justifying this goal?
Ofc every company is doing things to advance its own interests, in that regard, Amazon has 0 incentives to share customer data which is truly unique/invaluable, with Google, or any 3rd parties.
The more the things change, the more they stay the same
How is this different from arguing that sites, such as Google or Facebook, should have to pay to link to news articles? I appreciate and support Wikipedia, but I don’t think Google should be expected to help pay for it (though I’d appreciate if they did as a form of public service).
They gave a paltry $2m to the endowment a couple years ago. ...and how much did they make off serving Wikipedia content?
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
Google has publicly recognized that they have a problem with trust and incentives. So when they admit that and continue to non-execute on addressing core problems, that's when the monopoly needs to be rebalanced.
What does this mean? You think Google should pay for people who are sent to wikipedia.org after a Google Search? Or you think Google should pay for the information they scrape from Wikipedia and display to users on a Google search results page?
I'm pretty happy with all the free youtube content, search engine results, email, storage, word processor, spreadsheet, slide shows, messaging, and more I get
This cannot be stated enough. I think just YouTube alone would be enough to justify Google's existence.
Meanwhile Amazon has Twitch, and people there don't seem to think too highly of how things are being managed (they somehow managed to break every single adblock available and at this point have won against adblockers).
"[Amazon is] preventing Google’s tracking system FLoC — or Federated Learning of Cohorts — from gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research in Amazon’s vast e-commerce universe"
Compare with, e.g.:
"Amazon is taking steps to protect its user's privacy by blocking Google's heavy-handed overreach in leveraging its Chrome browser to spy on user's personal shopping habits and sell that information to other retailers".
(Note: I'm not saying my rewrite is unbiased. It's not. It's just biased in a different direction to highlight the contrast.)
That part seems to be the only universal truth these days.
But from what I think I know that's kind of right technically, but kind of not in terms of actual real privacy.
Yes, the actual browsing data, e.g. for the basic floc cohorts only what amazon product page you visited, is no longer 'sent' to ad networks (that's a pretty big oversimplification of how ad networks track you but for brevity). That data is parsed in your browser to generate a cohort ID for you.
But this cohort ID is exposed to the world document.interestCohort() and is what's used for targeting and tracking.
To me it seems that the cohorts are so small "thousands of people" + IP or UA it's basically the same as a semi-long lasting uuid.
And if you have like even 10 different cohort IDs, even if some of them are 'fake'/'noise' that's probably enough to ID you alone
Here's an image from google's site.
https://web-dev.imgix.net/image/80mq7dk16vVEg8BBhsVe42n6zn82...
It also seems like Chrome/google might be still defaulting browser settings to give themselves even more data just like they currently do?
https://github.com/WICG/floc#qualifying-users-for-whom-a-coh...
BUT when you layer on the other proposals (Fledge/Turtledove/Dovekey or whatever) - which I don't understand that much maybe someone else can explain - it seems like it basically collect this page/product level data and makes it available to DSP etc for tracking/ad serving (again if not technically 1:1 basically in consequence given the sizes of these groups).
Like one of the proposals talks about a 'trusted' key/value server which doesn't seem that different from what already happens? The original proposal wanted to move the entire ad bid/target/serve process into the browser.
Thank god they figured out it is illegal in Europe to do this without opt-in and didn't roll out FLoC here...
* I don't suspect he his.
Like perhaps using AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Sign In, etc, will include a buried implied "opt in" for your site at some point.
Google is quite good at rolling out changes slowly enough to spread out any outrage. Watching the progression of ads take over their SERP pages, it was very slow and subtle. No ads, then just sidebar ads. Then one ad below the first one or two results, then above them, eventually leading to some pages with nothing but ads above the fold. Over many, many years.
The floc repo currently says "The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors." Which is not super helpful. It seems like Google could fairly easily hide info from Floc since they own both sides.
(And while the author does say "Best guess", this isn't just an empty Google promise—if this changes, it would change the entire tenor of consensus-based standardization discussions that are happening here, and significantly lower Google's standing in the web standards community, which they care a lot about)
Not straight up lying, but downplaying concerns without actually being able to lay those concerns to rest.
But, it is certainly useful to publicly see floc sentiment. As far as I know, Amazon hasn't said anything publicly about floc, but now we know they are aware and doing something about it.
I saw that GitHub and The Guardian also rolled out the header.
Waiting for a website tracking who all has opted out to pop up.
I think the header also has value as a "last resort" to catch any unintentional use of floc if your org doesn't want it.
Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()
Source: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3209628
https://paramdeo.com/blog/opting-your-website-out-of-googles...
While they can be installed manually with extra steps, there are also other browsers out there.
[1] https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...
Sort of. Kind of.
googlebot only respects part of robots.txt, the part that refers specifically to itself. It doesn't respect global robots.txt rules.
Google also explicitly don't really respect the disallow rules:
> However, robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on external information such as incoming links, that it is relevant. If you wish to explicitly block a page from being indexed, you should instead use the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. In this case, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, because the page must be crawled in order for the tag to be seen and obeyed. [0]
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/ro...
sorry, wasn't meaning to imply Googs ignores robots.txt. I was going for conceptually it is easy to ignore it, just as it is easy, conceptually, to ignore HTTP headers.
>and tracking opt-outs for years, right?
is this provable? if i opt-out with my g-account in the browser on a desktop, that should imply i want out of all tracking, yet you have to do it on each app on each platform. it's wack-a-mole that is impossible to win.
The organization controlling "the thing" is the entity that asked for the feature, so we believe the thing will both know about it and honor it.
It's the only purpose this flag has.
Products that target based on actual user intent benefit from cookie blocks, as that cannot be meaningfully blocked ever. (i.e., when you search for "brunch" ads relating to brunch show up)
Products that target based on behavior away from the product will suffer - but morally I'm ok with that.
Google happens to own one of the most intentful products out there - you directly tell the product what you want to see! The main pain for them will be loss of targeting ability in their network ads displayed on 3rd party sites - but their first-party products I suspect will see a boost in the new world.
Has everyone forgotten OTA broadcast television? Where Geritol spent a fortune advertising on the Lawrence Welk Show? And Kellogs flooded Saturday morning cartoons?
I may be wrong, but I don't think advertisers have boosted their budgets in the age of targeted advertising. Google has done well to replace the old channels for advertising with their own pipeline. For the last twenty years it has mattered which ad platform could more accurately target your demographic. Google has won most of that war. Today, you pay Google whether the ad is targeted or not. So now, they can shift the battlefront to create other barriers to entry. And to keep people dependent on their infrastructure to package and deliver advertising at all.
A content website has nothing to sell, assuming it's not behind a paywall. They are typically funded using general purpose tracking ads. The ads are based on other websites you visit and have nothing to do with the content you're reading.
These websites may face a serious threat, and need an entirely different model. The most straight-forward alternative I imagine to be contextual non-tracked ads. Ads related to the content you're reading.
Other victims are to be found in the shady world of data aggregators. Their entire existence is based on cross site tracking.
Whilst websites and data parties may suffer, Google will continue to hoard data. Almost every website will continue to use Google analytics, Google fonts, Google Tag Manager, the like. This on top of the wide array of consumer products you may use: Android, its various Google apps, Gmail, Youtube, all of it.
It's virtually impossible to avoid Google touchpoints, they will continue to know more about you than you do about yourself. They don't need AdWords for that.
Is there a way we can just obfuscate / ruin our data with them?
Like a tool or browser extension I can run that clicks / visits a bunch of random links and totally trashes which "cohort" Google thinks I belong in.
I'd pay for this more than paying to opt-out. Then serve me all the ads you want.
Also there's an issue that bots are detected easily.
What do they mean here, that the actual page request does not send the "no FLoC" HTTP header but the requests from Analytics do?
What happens in this scenario?
So they might be trialing it this way because of that, to help boost their ad platform and hinder floc , so that google cannot drop third party cookies that easily , as floc’s on browser processing makes google the defacto judge on what information do they add into floc identifiers and what they do not , meanwhile themselves getting all the unrestricted data from their browsers separately.
By hindering mass scale adoption of floc , they’re trying to delay dropping of third party cookies , to slow down google from getting an advantage over them.
Atleast that’s what I think , they might be testing it for other reasons, only an Amazon exec can answer it specifically.
Personally I don't see depersonalized targeting as a bad thing. Better than advertising dish washers to people who just bought a dish washer or some such nonsense.
Hmm.
Additionally, it alleviates the creepiness factor a bit ("they're so bad at tracking, they don't even realize I just bought one!", so you don't think about the perfect match with headphones you were just offered) and they might simply have missed the purchase.
Gut punch
What would be the total bandwidth, energy and Co2 usage if the largest net entities from Google used this header?
This wording annoys me. The websites have nothing to do with it. Google choosing to turn it's browser into spyware that leaks information about what you used to do with it isn't the websites fault, the webserver doesn't do anything and doesn't have anything done to it, there is nothing for it to opt out of.
Google chose to give websites a way to request that the users browser doesn't include the fact that they visited this website in it's cohort calculation. That's fine, but the messaging around it is a transparent attempt at shifting the blame. It's not the website opting out or in, it's the website acting as an uninvolved third party bystander asking google to stop. Asking why a website didn't opt out is equivalent to a thief asking "well why didn't you stop me?" to the person looking on from the sidewalk.
We shouldn't accept this messaging. We should be very clear that Chrome is the entity spying on you, not the website, and that the website has no power to decide whether or not chrome spies on you, only the ability to make a polite request that it doesn't (or more accurately, does so less).
FLoC is only opt in for testing the proposal[0]. As a sibling comment says this is technically performative but publicly signals a stance against the proposal.
Though we also shouldn't forget that Amazon loves third party tracking and happily falls back to IP address associations if cookies aren't available.
Edit:
[0] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/floc/#take-part-in-a-floc-...
You can opt-in to actively be a part of FLoC, but if you don't opt-out, Google may randomly choose you to be part of their testing.
Edit: I think your point may have been from the perspective of a website owner. Sorry.
Google: More control to us, please.
Amazon: No.
