[remus]

To me it seems FLoC is more about trying to stop a fingerprinting arms race between browsers and adtech, as will happen if third party cookies are removed and no other alternative is provided. In an ideal world adtech companies would just hold up their hands and say 'games up, on to something else' but it's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars so if the more honest players leave the shadier companies will be only too happy to cash in.

[danShumway]

Part of the problem is that I don't believe FLoC will stop a fingerprinting arms race.

FLoC in many ways makes it easier to fingerprint users, and I don't think that advertisers are going to look at the brand new opportunity FLoC-enhanced fingerprinting presents and just leave it sitting there untouched. There's nothing built into the FLoC spec that prevents advertisers from adding in additional fingerprinting on top of FLoC, and we've been down this road already with stuff like DNT. If any technology at all can be abused for fingerprinting, they'll abuse it. The market they're in doesn't allow them to have restraint, somebody will cross the line and then everyone else will follow under the excuse of being competitive.

So I'm just not willing to give advertisers the benefit of the doubt anymore, or to assume that if we meet them halfway they'll be satisfied. They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.

[luckylion]

> we've been down this road already with stuff like DNT

Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value. Had they not made that move, there's a good chance, we'd have seen DNT honored and eventually codified.

> They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.

I agree, if you give them no option whatsoever, there will never be legislation reining them in. With FLoC, you could outlaw other forms of tracking and add significant fines. Without it, politicians will not move a finger over concerns to damage the industry.

[danShumway]

> Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value

I totally disagree. Just going to link to a few previous comments I've made on this subject rather than rehash the entire discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294280

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24289186

It is not Microsoft's fault that DNT failed; a privacy option that can't be turned on by default is not a real privacy option. Microsoft made the decision to turn on DNT by default because it determined that most of its users didn't want to be tracked, and the ones that did want to be tracked could go turn the header off. That's a very reasonable determination for any privacy-respecting browser to make. Users should be able to have defaults that closely align with their preferred user-agent behavior.

The reason DNT failed was not because of underhanded sabotage. It's because it got adoption. Advertisers were unwilling to remain in a world where the majority of people didn't get targeted. That's why I say they burned the bridge, because DNT's wide adoption was never a real option for them in the first place -- it's entire existence was predicated on the assumption that most people would not use it.

> there will never be legislation reining them in

We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy. I guarantee if you go to anyone in Congress and ask them why they're not supporting a privacy bill, they are not going to respond, "we would if better technology and standards existed for targeting." Senators and Congresspersons aren't thinking about browser standards in that level of detail. And if you're worried about advertisers lobbying, I do not believe that FLoC is going to make advertisers lobby less to block any privacy bill.

[luckylion]

> That's a very reasonable determination for any privacy-respecting browser to make. Users should be able to have defaults that closely align with their preferred user-agent behavior.

I understand this as "Microsoft produced a privacy-respecting browser and had their user's best interest on their mind", and I find it hard to engage that, because we seem to be living in wildly different realities.

> We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy.

We won't, so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad and we'd prefer to remain where we are right now.

[danShumway]

> and I find it hard to engage that

Fair enough. If Firefox and Chrome enabled DNT by default, do you think the outcome would have been different? Ie, do you think that advertisers rebelled specifically because they thought Microsoft was hypocritical about tracking?

I don't. I don't think there's evidence that advertisers were mad at Microsoft, and the reasoning I have for that is that they stopped respecting DNT across the entire browser ecosystem, not just on IE. The other point of evidence I have is that advertisers are similarly angry about every other privacy-mechanism that gives users choice, even in browsers like Safari and on platforms like iOS.

I think my theory is a pretty consistently reasonable explanation for all of those scenarios. Why are advertisers mad about iOS privacy changes? Is it because Apple is hypocritical? Or is it because a lot of people use iOS, and advertisers don't want to see widespread adoption of any privacy tools? You can find a consistent correlation between how angry advertisers get about any privacy-enhancing proposal and the number of people it would impact.

> so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad

I don't think that's what anyone at all is saying. I disagree that FLoC is a change in the right direction, and I disagree that it will make any legislation any more likely.

I could just as easily make the same point back to you. You're arguing that we should embrace a new tracking standard that makes privacy worse just because an arms race where browsers try to stop tracking entirely on their own isn't a perfect solution.

But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition. And I don't see any evidence that adding FLoC is going to make US Senators feel better about privacy bills, or that it's going to change how advertisers lobby those Senators.

[luckylion]

> Ie, do you think that advertisers rebelled specifically because they thought Microsoft was hypocritical about tracking?

No, but I don't think Firefox would've done that, because they had no interest in killing the feature (which was predicted to happen soon as they announced, certainly their smart people were aware of the consequences of their actions -- and they have very good connections to ad-tech, they're part of it, hence their understanding of the response and interest for the events to play out exactly like they did).

For Mozilla, I would have had a much easier time to assume good faith, for Microsoft I find that very hard to believe, much like their Shenanigans with IE on Windows and not allowing removal, making browser install hard etc wasn't done because they thought IE was the best browser and users couldn't possibly want to switch.

Similarly, I don't believe Google suggests FLoC because they want to protect privacy by any means necessary. But that doesn't mean that it's not better for the average user than what we have today. And we won't get any movement without Google.

> But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition.

Two of the four major browsers are built by ad-tech companies, another one is almost entirely funded by an ad-tech company. That leaves Safari, and Apple has no intention to offer it to all users.

Google will not fight against itself (and it's the only relevant player on both sides), there will be no arms race. As for US Senators: who in ad-tech has more to spend than Google, Facebook, and Microsoft?

[MiddleEndian]

>Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value. Had they not made that move, there's a good chance, we'd have seen DNT honored and eventually codified.

I always thought this was a naive take. People would say "Of course websites and ad services will respect DNT, it's in the spec!" as if that was a magic incantation that would prevent corps from tracking you.

[luckylion]

You don't necessarily need to rely on the spec, you can get it into law. Like GDPR.

Politicians will not destroy an industry, but they will regulate it. If regulation == destruction, they won't touch it.

[MiddleEndian]

I suppose you could, assuming the law had teeth and was actually enforceable in a meaningful sense.

But in my opinion, the idea that a flag begging companies not to track them would be respected was always a naive fantasy, regardless of whether it was turned on by default (because why wouldn't I want this turned on by default if it worked?).

[danShumway]

GDPR passed without FLoC though.

Do we have evidence that advertisers are going to stop lobbying politicians if FLoC is introduced? Have they promised to do that anywhere?