https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir...
Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.
curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021 \
|sed -n '/<meta property=.og:title. content=./{s//<title>/;s/\" ./<\/title/;p;}' \
|egrep -o "(<p>.*</p>)|(<title>.*</title>)" > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-to-stop-selling-ads-based-on-your-specific-web-browsing-11614780021
Free extension that can remove paywalls from many of the big news sites. Works on Chrome, Edge and Mozilla.
Just knowing how things worked resulted in a number of people assuming I could hack banks, and either asking me too, or shunning me. Or flat out accusing me of it.
Umm you could go around mugging people much easier then I could hack stuff. That explanation never went over well.
Had to ask one boss to stop threatening employees to have me hack them. It was in jest, but I was terrified at how people would react if they thought I bypass security. Didn’t help that I knew how, as security was crap back then.
I leaned to keep my mouth shut, and refused to keep up with security stuff. Can’t hack if I don’t know how.
Much like a tech company that wants www readers to believe it is working to solve a problem www users are having that the tech company itself created (which, it just so happens, is not a problem at all for advertisers).
If you've searched for baby clothes in Google there's absolutely nothing in the FLoC proposal that stops Google from inferring that you're a parent from that search and, idk, storing a bit in your profile or something.
This proposal is about allowing ad targeting to interests or whatever without tracking your visits across the web - your browser generates the cohorts clientside (idk how the cohort assignment algorithms get standardised on, I guess that's where the 'tuning' would go). And yes, you could just tell your browser not to do that, or have it only use the most recent n days' data, or randomize your cohort, or freeze your cohort in time, or blocklist certain sites from ever entering your cohort, and so on.
Where this ties into tracking if you're a parent is that while it doesn't prevent tracking that, it does lessen the incentive - if you're a parent, you're likely going to wind up in a parent-y cohort. Is the signal from the original search still going to be useful enough to warrant keeping around?
(obligatory: googler, but nothing to do with ads)
As I noted in my original message - yes, its client side, you can do whatever. (‘Whether the browser sends a real FLoC or a random one is user controllable’ https://github.com/WICG/floc)
This prompt will never happen. The last thing Google wants is any additional association between their brand and advertising.
Google's mode of operation has always been to sneak in the back door and count how many boxes of cereal you have while you are looking at underwear. Knocking on the front door and to ask if they can come in would likely never occur to them.
There is no mention of Chrome being an ad supported product anywhere when you install it. They want that association completely out of people's heads.
1. Advertisers - who would add you to a cohort they own, so say "Nike - womens-running-shoes"
2. Publishers - who'd want these cohorts to better allow for advertisers to advertiser on their site, so "NYTimes - business-section-reader"
3. Third party ad-tech companies looking to create audiences for advertisers who work with them, so "Example Agency - mens-formal-wear". They'd partner with publishers so that when you go to somewhere like GQ or Man of Many and read an article on tuxedos then you'd get added to the cohort.
So you are right, you'd never see a prompt to add in your interests, but this isn't because Google doesn't want to associate with specific brands, it's that Google isn't necessarily an owner of a cohort (though they totally could create their own under any 3 of those categories).
I don't think we'll get away from the cookie popups, ever. It's just like the "I agree to the TOS / EULA" checkboxes. Legally toothless, but you'd better have one, just in case.
Of course you need to store the user's preference. So now the site needed to have a cookie. One cookie which just stores the fact that the user has or hasn't consented to cookies.
Even cookie pop ups are not respected. If you visit Facebook sites by accident they’ll leave their tracking cookies before you’ve had a chance to read the terms and leave the site.
Google doesn’t really need much more that what it has. It has third-party big data, Gmail, Google Search and a very recent optimized cache of everything important that it’s crawlers can get and more. People get so caught up in the minutia; Google is big, like category 100 Hurricane big, where people laugh and say there is no category 100; but that’s what it is- classification system aside.
Anti-trust and pro-privacy are distractions that Alphabet, Google, etc. can put their left-fielder on while they run the bases, because they play both teams.
Either way I reckon it's the same thing stopping people from just sending random data over google-analytics. So, not a whole lot, other than whatever anti-spam mechanisms google bothered to put in place.
Back when I was in the security field, I heard discussions about this sort of thing as a form of attack. The question was whether a computer that sent false or incorrect information was either engaging in a DOS attack or was violating the CFAA in that it was using false information to access a service. The DOS attack would be on the tracking system rather than a website resource, false information to degrade the effectiveness of the tracking system overall. The CFAA angle would be that participation in ads/tacking was part of the contract for accessing the 'free' service, that by blocking ads or sending false info the user is using a false credential to access the service. At the time, many thought that by using an ad-blocker that users were failing to pay, passively stealing website content. Those who sent false information were engaged in active theft.
I don't think I'll ever quite understand the idea that the user is under any obligation to do whatever. Just because their user-agent might have some default behaviour doesn't mean that the user-agent should be expected to act in the interest of the server.
Though there's an argument to be made that sending lots of false data in response to a request to post personal information to google-analytics is a bit like manipulating a public survey by sending in silly answers. I'm not sure to what extent that is illegal but I'll grant that it's not exactly ethically correct.
Because, at this time, ad blocking tools are relatively benign. But what if we think of them more as content-blocking or content-management tools? What if I have a tool that blocks only right-wing advertisements or content? What if I have a tool that blocks all images of women showing too much skin? Block images of black people? Such not-neutral tools would radically change public perceptions. Legislation might follow.
There was a comical toll out there that would replace the text "Trump" with "The idiot" on viewed websites. That's the thin edge of this wedge.
There does seem to be momentum towards a narrow reading of the CFAA when it comes to providing false information against terms of service, though, as per these 2013 analyses... though they fall short of actually giving any guarantees.
https://www.whiteandwilliams.com/media/alert/247_Coverage%20...
http://tsi.brooklaw.edu/cases/matot-v-ch
On the other hand, a denial of a motion to dismiss in Ticketmaster v. Prestige from 2018 seems to have drawn a distinction between breaching terms of service alone, and being told in a cease-and-desist not to breach those terms; the latter more clearly outlines what would be considered exceeding authorized levels of access.
https://casetext.com/case/ticketmaster-llc-v-prestige-entmt-...
Where does false information end and privilege escalation begin? Can that question depend on whether your privilege escalation is something as simple as "I'm now able to avoid the fine-print contract that I need to watch certain types and customizations of ads in order to access the service?" What constitutes sufficient notice to a user that certain actions are explicitly forbidden, if a C&D does but terms of service do not? All questions that, as far as I can tell, haven't been fully answered.
(Obligatory: Not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice.)
I'm horrified whenever I see people having this perception of the issue, and worried that it'll get accepted by the legal system as the correct view.
From my POV, the only contract that exists between me and a random ad-loaded website is the one negotiated between my computer and their server - that is, the HTTP protocol, which clearly stipulates that I can render any reply you send me in whatever way I like. This contract provides many tools for expressing the intent of gating content behind some requirements (like payment, or receiving different content first), but the common rule is: you don't send the content you're gating before the client proves they've met the requirements.
And honestly, I'd consider mixing ads into content to be borderline CFAA (the ads themselves being abusive and often fraudlent, and sometimes malware) - and sending software intending to compromise my user agent (like trackers, or ad-blocking busters) to be crossing the CFAA line. Unfortunately, I don't think the lawyers would agree with me :(.
If you are asked to leave and do not leave I can see you possibly being arrested for trespassing, but I fail to see what you would be arrested for by bringing in food from outside the theatre. Sure, they could ban you from coming back to property (and this could lead to trespassing arrests, if you did return) but thats about it.
Much like cinemas. If I try to bring in food I didn't bought at the cinema store, I will be stopped at ticket check and refused entry. Also, the cinema doesn't require me to buy food as a condition for watching the movie. If they did, I'd consider it the price of entry.
What current ad-loaded websites are doing is the equivalent of letting you in to watch a movie, and then having someone come to you as you're watching, and poke you and yell at you because you didn't buy anything at the store.
> They can call the cops and have you arrested for accessing the theatre in contravention of the rule.
I've never heard of a cinema calling cops on people who snuck in food into the theatre. Is that US-specific?
What would stop them from implementing FLoC in the cloud for non-Chrome users? Fundamentally, where the data is stored is meaningless. So long as they are pushing everything through this same "FLoC" model, they are claiming they won't be tracking individuals.
So on Chrome, FLoC is local —your own browser working against you—for Safari and FireFox, FLoC is cloud based.
So long as the web sites in question are running Google Analytics, they still have the software on your system on a huge number of sites.
This would require being to identify a user when they are on many different sites (cross-site tracking), which all the major browsers intend to prevent.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
There was also the Do not Track setting, which Google ignored. So in my book (and I’m not alone here), anything coming from Google is taken with a huge grain of salt.
For some time, there has been a sort of cat and mouse game between advertisers and browser makers. Do you know Google isn’t using fingerprinting to identify us? Or just IP or some other means?
What I'm saying is Safari [1], Firefox [2], and Chrome [3] are planning technical mitigations that would prevent anyone from implementing a cloud-based FLoC. Even if you don't believe Chrome, it wouldn't be possible in Safari or Firefox.
> Do you know Google isn’t using fingerprinting to identify us? Or just IP or some other means?
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... has "once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products" and "our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers" which seem pretty clear to me? Additionally, I work in client-side ads infra, and I'm pretty sure I would know if Google were fingerprinting users to target ads.
[1] https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Anti_tracking_policy#1._Cr...
[3] https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...
So, you have millions of users, and you make it "k-anonymous", or "anonymous if you squint real good". Is it really possible to find k such that privacy is meaningfully preserved, given the heaps of other information you have?
Say I belong to some cohort, and you know my IP address. I think this would be enough to fingerprint me reliably, never mind OS version, browser, plugins, etc.
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... links to https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness for how they intend to handle this.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
New parent. Lives in Springfield. Works at a power plant. Drives a car. Owns house. Horrible credit rating. Married with 2+ kids. Voted in last election. Ex military. Ex astronaut. Once purchased an effective baldness cure. How many seemingly large cohorts does it take before you are really talking about one clearly identifiable person?
It takes 33 “perfect” yes/no questions to identify uniquely anyone on earth. It is seemingly large since each question splits the world in two.
Of course this is in a perfect world, but I remember seeing quizzes which would guess any object given a few yes/no question. Or perhaps it was people.
Not many probably know the person in question with her real name - but almost everyone who's ever watched Charlie Brooker's productions should recognise her as Philomena Cunk.
At that point the kids usually go for broke and ask me if my player is Susan.
"Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon image of 24 people [...] Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates."
No, users are only in a single cohort: "cohort = await document.interestCohort()" -- https://github.com/WICG/floc
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
Do cohorts allow advertisers to say, "Show this ad to anyone in a cohort with an affinity for 'new-parent' over threshold X?" is that so?
Do they let advertisers say, "here are the cohorts of our best 1000 customers, please show ads to anyone else in those cohorts?"
Would people in "my cohort" be the 1000-10000 people most like me in browsing habits in the world?
(Disclaimer, have tried to buy limited quantities of ads in the past, interested in some part as an advertiser)
Yes: "a browser can group together people with similar browsing habits, so that ad tech companies can observe the habits of large groups instead of the activity of individuals. Ad targeting could then be partly based on what group the person falls into."
> there would be one cohort of "new-parent-lives-in-springfield-works-in-power-plant-etc-etc" (combining multiple unrelated interests), it just has to have thousands of people in it?
I mean, there aren't thousands of new parents who live in Springfield and work in a power plant? You would be in a cohort like "43A7".
> Do cohorts allow advertisers to say, "Show this ad to anyone in a cohort with an affinity for 'new-parent' over threshold X?" is that so?
Not really? An advertiser or (ad tech company) might learn, over time, that people in cohort "43A7" are very likely to be interested in baby clothes while people in cohort "5B7E" are more likely than average but not by that much. So they might be willing to bid more to show baby clothes to someone in 43A7 than in 5B7E, and not bid at all for most other cohorts. But the browser API just gives you an opaque cohort identifier.
> Do they let advertisers say, "here are the cohorts of our best 1000 customers, please show ads to anyone else in those cohorts?"
From my reading of the spec, that seems like it would work well.
Could a browser vendor send down a mapping of cohort hashes to interest vectors? I don't see anything in https://github.com/WICG/floc that suggests that couldn't happen, and it seems like it could greatly enhance utility without too much sacrifice to privacy. For example, it'd allow an advertiser to target all cohorts who like american football, I'd think.
Advertising rarely is about targeting “John doe” but usually about targeting “[men] && [in Springfield] && [searching for a baldness cures]”.
(I still will do everything in my technical power to disable floc, and still will never trust google). But I do think the implementation removes most of the advertising incentive to track on an individual person level.
Thats what makes FLOC tolerable. The legit stuff is enabled, and it makes it harder to get the other stuff (not impossible of course).
> What about nefarious people who want to put a malware link in front of a specific person.
It'll at least be harder than pre-floc (ideally).
The point is to remove the incentives to collect as much data about an individual (you don't need full profiles of someone) by creating even easier ways to get useful targeting without the direct individual identification.
---
(also, i'm broadly against tracking in general, just to be clear. The point you raised is very valid - esp with existing methods).
The current landscape, however, does not prioritize user-privacy and serves ads to unsuspecting users who do not always know the terms they agreed to.
Moving away from the present opt-out to an opt-in model would give the user a say in how they would like to be tracked across the web. This is also what Apple is trying to do with its "nutritional-info" (not fanboying Apple here) labels. A user is free to consume the content they would like, but they have a right to know how their data is being used.
Still probably a step in the right direction.
How far can this data be reversed? If I have a group of ten people can google tell with high reliability that probably three of them are homosexual, two have Alzheimer's and none are pregnant?
* Google sees the writing on the wall: people are becoming more privacy conscious, but more importantly governments in many countries are making motions to suggest this sort of tracking could be regulated in the future. They need to stay ahead of the curve.
* The value of tracking people in this way may be less than everybody seems to think - not all data about a person's activities is equally monetizable. Just because you read an article about Julius Caesar and then looked at some clickbait article about Britney Spears doesn't mean an advertiser can sell you a chariot.
* Google in making the first move can create an advantage for itself in the market
* Much of Google's revenue comes from their own properties -- in the case of search, they are already well positioned to show you relevant ads because you have shown intent. No need for cookies there.
* Google has a dominant position with Chrome and the article suggests they want to do fingerprinting of a person's browsing behavior and put people into different cohorts without sending the raw data to Google. This is similar to how Apple does machine learning on device. If Google has exclusive access to these cohorts, they have a strong incentive to move to a cookie-less model because it puts other ad networks at a disadvantage.
It also completely eliminates the creep factor and conspiracies around adverts. "How did they know I was interested in this, are they listening to my phone?" goes away when its the same as the content you are looking at currently.
Also there are a plethora of contexts where this wouldn't work well. For example, Instagram has the best targeted ads I've ever seen – basically every ad I get is for something I would consider buying.
I don't think their ads would work nearly so well if I got an add for a guitar just because my friend tagged her post with #guitar.
A constant bombarding reminder that I need a new backpack. 90 percent of websites I visit are not about backpacks. I'm getting 90% more ads about backpacks.
Bigger telescope systems can resolve smaller objects, but even if you were to yeet an enormous, optically perfect, 10m telescope into the very lowest earth orbit possible (not maintainable due to atmospheric drag) you would still be a couple orders of magnitude away from being able to read the date on a dime.
a degree of arc is divided into minutes of arc (MoA)(1/60 degree each), and there are 60 arcseconds in a minute of arc.
Two points that are 1 milliarcsecond apart, projected on a flat surface 200km away, are about 1mm apart on that surface.
edit: (can plug "tan(0.001 arcseconds) * 200km in mm" into google to check this out for yourself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#/me...
I would guess that you'd need 0.25mm resolution, which at 200km would require 250microarcseconds angular res, which doesn't even register on that graph at any wavelength or size of telescope lol
edit: this is a very 'spherical cow' analysis. i'm pretty sure that atmospheric effects will kill your ability to image stuff like this well before angular resolution will.
Also, perhaps there's a need for a better naming system than one that produces ‘Extremely Large Telescope’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...
10m is a tiny aperture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar
Keep in mind that advertisers really don't care what your name is or where you live. They care that you are into action movies and buy fancy shampoos. The other stuff just creates trouble.
Google cares on their own.
And current advertisers may not care but who knows what kind of technology they may come up with in the future where that data might be valuable, having extra data has never been a problem for google.
tracking, including the costs of collecting and storing all that data as well as the PR cost of people being creeped out by all that data you store, is expensive. Given how accurately i'm targeted by most advertising (not very) it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that ads will be just as effective and just as revenue-generating if their tracking becomes a bit less granular.
I think the problem is not ad targeting, but ad inventory. They want to sell things we don't need, that's the real cause of the low efficiency.
They should better focus on things people actually need at the time of search.
My guess is that they smell a change in the regulatory wind (EU and possibly US as well) and anticipate that if they get out ahead of it, those regulations will serve as a competitive moat against other advertisers.
That, or their A/B testing has confirmed ad quality isn't remarkably improved over the combination of search-tuned ads, adsense topic ads tuned to the site the user is browsing, and display ads tuned by data the site owner vends to Google about the user to fine-tune ad selection for them. They have enough data to know one way or another, and if it turns out there's not enough value-add to justify retaining all that user browsing state, dropping collation and storage of it can free up room for dozens of new projects.
It's easy to forget that one of the major constraints on what Google can do, at their scale, is storage and processing; they're so big that from most people's vantage points, those resources seem limitless, but inside Google, they know exactly how much they aren't doing because the machines and networking they already own are already pushing petabytes of data around and are already near max peak capacity for their mission-critical applications. Sometimes, the cheapest way to get more space for a new bet or an existing mission-critical task is to just stop doing something else.
I'd love to see my scenario be true, but I'm afraid that it's much less likely than yours.
RCS = Radar Cross-section (a bit more field-specific, more or less how "big" the thing looks on radar, but it is a bit jargony -- it depends on things like the material and radar wavelength).
RCS -> Radar cross section
RCS: Radar Cross Section - how big of a reflection an object makes at radar wavelengths.
Radar Cross Section
I think this is your answer right there.
To be fair, Google's biggest money maker is their SEA, which doesn't rely on your behavioral data, since user intent is given through a search query.
Facebook seems to know what Kickstarter products I’ve backed, what specific miniature paints I like and seemingly which I’ve already bought. Possibly because a lot of my miniature hobby socialising takes place in messenger and on Instagram.
Google by contrast is so bad at advertising, that I often have to re-search on duck duck go to find a webshop that I can actually use post-brexit. Maybe because google knows I don’t speak Spanish, Italian and suck at German? But I mean, I still buy stuff from Spanish websites using the translate function in chrome, so, shouldn’t they know better?
Anyway, for me personal and anecdotal, it seems google is really bad at predicting what I want. I mean, even for content. The front page of YouTube is full of videos I’ve already seen...
Of course they move away from this, the must have brainstormed and tested new ways for years. OTOH, it is stunning that we’ve invented tech that is stable even when an ad-blocker interferes with the webpage, cookies, js, requests, etc. Try that with binaries! (which is probably where they plan to move the code)
Correction: if you go by the profit reports from Alphabet, Google Display Ads is not their biggest money maker by a long shot. That's still Search Ads
Oh stop it with these conspiracies.
Google (like Facebook) has been pushed in this direction for ~2-3 years by changes in Safari to the point that Google has started preparing for this pro-actively
Why do you think Google hasn't complained like FB about the upcoming changes in ios ?
Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just applied statistics. So statistically significant and unbiased sampling is what makes advertising work.
Highly-targeted and personalized ads are a crutch due to the fact that unbiased sampling is pretty much impossible on the internet. (There's a joke about this: "an online poll has shown that internet penetration has now reached 100 percent".)
Neither advertisers nor publishers actually want to collect high-resolution data, it's a huge cost with very little benefit.
In the future, you don't have to rely on serendipity to find money on the street. You just use a satellite to find it for you.
the US hegemony relies on a perception of omnipotence, so there will always be a lot of boisterous claims
Even the NSA presentations and code leaks this century didnt really have surprises more just angst about their lack of accountability
I know this sounds laughable given how toothless regulators have been thus far, but let's not forget that a) fines under GDPR have been growing and are likely to continue to do so, with ad tech in a particularly awkward spot, and b) both the EU and US governments and regulators have started nosing around big tech on a variety of fronts, including privacy and antitrust concerns.
Given that, the cost-benefit analysis becomes pretty complicated. They may feel a shift to a scheme which lowers revenues while avoiding regulatory scrutiny now makes sense.
Full disclosure: I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I get more skeptical (and fearful) with each page turn.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...