[doomslice]

Just as a reminder, Google is also planning to drastically improve privacy through a sandbox in Chrome: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

FLoC (and FLEDGE, and PARAKEET, and a million other bird proposals) is being used as a way to mitigate some of the loss that publishers and advertisers will see when those privacy measures are put into place.

[reaperducer]

FLoC (and FLEDGE, and PARAKEET, and a million other bird proposals) is being used as a way to mitigate some of the loss that publishers and advertisers will see when those privacy measures are put into place.

I think this illustrates that the whole bird-brained idea is to placate the advertisers so they won't run to congress, while continuing to allow Google to fingerprint people with its own, better, data, thus increasing its advertising advantage.

[doomslice]

That's one way to look at it, and certainly a view that many share -- but isn't that more likely to attract regulatory scrutiny instead of deflect it?

I sit in on many of these W3C meetings (I'm not from Google) and the discussion is always "given that we want to achieve X definition of privacy (where X varies depending on the proposal), how can we mitigate some of the fallout that will happen". It's never "how can we defeat these privacy measures that are going to be put into place so we can keep the status quo".

You can argue that advertising is a net negative for the web or that it's evil or whatever you want, but if you frame it as "how can we take steps to make things more private for end users without completely destroying the way business on the web make money" then I think the current path is a reasonable one.

[Corazoor]

You cannot separate the morality of an action from it's usefulness to business, thats putting the horse before the cart.

Modifying your last sentence illustrates this nicely:

You can argue that slavery is a net negative for the world or that it's evil or whatever you want, but if you frame it as "how can we take steps to make things better for slaves without completely destroying the way business on the world make money" then I think the current path is a reasonable one.

[kevinh]

Is there a version of Godwin's Law but for slavery comparisons?

[warkdarrior]

This is a very loose definition of "privacy." It is more accurate to say that they plan to create a sandbox for privacy, to limit the amount of privacy you are allowed to have. As the article describes, all of these techniques are additional signals for tracking purposes.

[doomslice]

I don't think that's an accurate representation at all. Look through the proposals and see, for instance, that it goes beyond anything that Firefox is planning to do.

Dropping third party cookies is just one small piece of it.