is pretty abhorrent looking. First-class advertising support in a browser is a major turn-off. Google is probably only a few steps away from losing controlling stake in Chromium, and stuff like this certainly will lead others to flock away.
Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy. It does interest inference client-side, away from bigcorp servers. It doesn't leak any information about you. But all the "privacy" people are totally against it anyway.
Why? Because they just hate advertising. The whole "third party cookies are bad" thing has always been a sham: it was never about privacy. It's always been about killing advertising itself.
Advertising is a scourge on the internet, and society in general. I doubt anyone would really miss those awful things. So yes, I want to kill advertising.
>> Why is it abhorrent? FLoC doesn't compromise your privacy.
You misunderstand - Google is in the business of compromising your privacy. They have lots of teams of lots of very smart people figuring out how to compromise your privacy.
Further, they are in the real world business of doing it. They are not naïve as your comment was - they find the balance of how far they can push it, by a combination of monopoly power, and also cunning politics, PR and posturing - they are fighting tooth and nail and using every tactic and trick in the business, with an unlimited budget - specifically to compromise your privacy for their financial and political power gain. Any area where they 'seemingly' back away from compromising your privacy, is where they have done extensive cost benefit analysis, and come up with alternative trickier or less understood ways to get what they want but that is more politically acceptable.
This is the underlaying reality - the rest of the details of FLoC etc is an information battleground where you as a user are fighting unlimited budget teams that are highly motivated to exploit your privacy. Advertising is in fact just one slice of the power they wield by exploiting your privacy along with everyone else on the planet's.
If you try to look at just FLoC in isolation you will miss the forest for the trees, as the results of FLoC are correlated with many other sources of information.
FLoC's motivations are some balance of:
- reducing PR fallout due to increasing awareness of their exploitation of everyone's privacy
- keeping full access to information they already extract from you and everyone else, and in fact increasing it as possible
- reducing or hindering other parties access to the total information so they gain more relative power
The rest my dear chap is details and their teams and teams of analysts working on this have all day every year to outsmart you in the details of how this is implemented.
all obnoxious ads are bad, but I tend to find the less targeted ones, for example the ones for payday loans or ambulance chasers, more obnoxious than products based on my hobbies.
