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by Seirdy 1834 days ago
> Does that really do anything?

It does very little; effort is better spent getting people off FLoCed browsers like Chrome.

More info: https://seirdy.one/2021/04/16/permissions-policy-floc-misinf...

This is what's really bad about FLoC; it's so hard to fight back on behalf of oblivious Chrome users who didn't opt out. For the uninformed, there's no winning move.
1 comments
tyingq 1834 days ago
That post is helpful, but adding a global header across a site is typically very little effort. And there's nothing in there that says it's harmful.

And I'm unconvinced on this part:

"If your website does not include JS that calls document.interestCohort(), it will not leverage Google’s FLoC. Explicitly opting out will not change this."

I try to know everything running on my site. But especially with things like a deep npm dependency chain, I know not everyone knows everything that's running on their site. Or maybe chrome will interpret an image that happens to be an IAB size as an ad. I recall a certain storage related company recently running Google Analytics on an admin page, something the tech team didn't intend to happen. But shit happens.

I think it's worth putting up, both for whatever limited help it provides, as well as a visible vote against FloC.

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Seirdy 1834 days ago
If your stack is so deep that you're worried about serving malware to users for them to execute, you might want to put a warning on your site so users understand the risk before executing scripts.

The fact that the above sentence sounds unrealistic nowadays is extremely depressing. If malware distribution through web browsers wasn't already the norm, it'd look like common sense.

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tyingq 1834 days ago
Aside from the stack, I also mentioned a marketing department doing something the tech department wasn't aware of. It happens.
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Seirdy 1833 days ago
If the tech department needs to protect users from the marketing department and can't approve or advise changes the marketing department does, then this is a good short-term solution. Fixing the organizational issues would be a good long-term solution.

I do admit that "a visible vote against FLoC" is a good reason to put this header; I've updated the article.

Diff: https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one/commit/155d4f7b915f9f04...

I don't think these votes will sway Google but I do think they'll spread awareness. I still think that a better use of our time is getting users off Chrome.

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