What I don't get about the reporting on this topic: Isn't all this opt-out stuff just necessary while Google is testing FLoC and it'll be opt-in(!) after it leaves Origin Trial phase? Or is this Google employee straight up lying* here? https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...
I don't think he's straight up lying, but I do think the truth is probably more than what he's saying.
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.
I'm also curious how much info Google will choose to expose to Floc on their various sites. Within Gmail, for example, they could be very generous to other advertisers, or not. They already have the info, so I assume they could only expose a cohort interest of "email" if they wanted to.
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.
All of the reporting is ignoring this fact because everyone who's commenting on this issue is ignoring this fact in favor of their own assumptions about how the platform works. "Opt-out for testing, opt-in for production" has been the design from day one, but a lie can run 'round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
(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 just an empty Google promise, but really not even a promise at all. This is just some poor guy that really wants to believe his employer "won't be evil" while the rest of the world already knows they are. But hey, a few more years of making money from his stock options and more obvious moves from Google and then he'll leave and talk like he's the world's biggest privacy advocate...
Kinda like when Steve Jobs downplayed concerns about the 30% cut from the app store by saying it's not important because everybody is using web apps anyway?
"Our best guess". The author of those tweets literally admits that they don't know what will happen. Personally, I'm not as inclined as them to give Google the benefit of the doubt until the absolute last minute.
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.