| > If you read into the federated technology they've been deploying I'm fairly comfortable saying I agree with their decisions. I don't, not in this case. The only thing that FLoC seems to change is how data is aggregated and how buckets are determined. But fundamentally, the idea of taking users, putting them into a box based on their normal browsing habits behind the scenes, and then broadcasting that box and associated data to every website they visit -- that's just not a private model. What Google doesn't seem to understand (or chooses not to understand) is that the end result of bucketing users and sharing data about them behind the scenes while they browse is the part that many people object to. So Google keeps on trying to come up with systems that allow them to serve different content to people and to collect demographic info based on variables and processes outside of users' control -- but to somehow do it in a way that is magically not a problem. But it's like trying to create a 'nice' mugging. It's not just the methods I'm opposed to, it's also the end goal. FLoC still doesn't give users control over how they present themselves on the web. And part of privacy -- part of the reason I care about privacy in the first place -- is because people should have control over how they present themselves on the web. There are tools Google could build if they wanted to go in that direction, but FLoC remains an opaque system that runs in the background that collects data about you and sends it to every website that you visit. That's not a private system, regardless of how the data is collected. It's not designed to be transparent, it's not designed around user consent. Honestly, it shouldn't even be an opt-in/opt-out system. Why can't I choose what buckets I belong to? Google isn't thinking deeply about user choice, they're not even being remotely imaginative about how they could give users more power over what ads are shown to them. They're still stuck in a mindset of "this needs to happen behind the scenes outside of your control where you don't know what we think about you. And we'll let you opt out of the entire system purely because we're forced to. But nothing else!" |
That’s been on my mind a lot lately, so much that I wrote a thing about it: https://kronopath.net/blog/segmented-identity-as-necessary-f...