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Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

(www.eff.org)
604 points wyldfire | 4 comments | 04 Mar 21 15:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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asdfasgasdgasdg ◴[04 Mar 21 17:02 UTC] No.26344915[source]▶
I think they're going to need to state their case in a way that allows Google to still make money and be competitive in the market place. It's not a simple matter of doing it and not doing it. It's a matter of doing it, and making more money or not doing it and making less. Google seems willing to move in the direction of privacy, but it's not going to do so in a way that sabotages the bottom line. It's unrealistic to expect any entity to voluntarily sacrifice its own values for the values of another.
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fitblipper ◴[04 Mar 21 17:30 UTC] No.26345265[source]▶
If their intent is to convince Google, then I agree. If the intent is to convince the public and policy makers, I don't think they need to re-frame it. I am okay letting a company (even a complete industry) fail if society has decided that the industry or business practices are parasitic.

Privacy is a freedom which has many parasites (state and private entity driven) attacking it and I welcome changes to perception, regulation, and law which places safeguards around it.

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1. izacus ◴[04 Mar 21 17:37 UTC] No.26345360[source]▶
And do you consider a complete ban of 100B+ advertising industry and complete ban of tracking (happily used by governments) a likely outcome?

Even the mighty Apple still tracks analytics data and separates that into a separate switch from the ones limiting non-Apple tracking.

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2. fitblipper ◴[04 Mar 21 18:06 UTC] No.26345826[source]▶
Not how opinions and politics stand now, but that is part of the reason why articles like this are important. There is quite a distance to travel between writing an article criticizing tracking + the technology that enables it and arriving at legislation.
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3. izacus ◴[04 Mar 21 18:14 UTC] No.26345946[source]▶
I might be traitor to the cause, but I feel like giving the industry an "out" might be easier to achieve and significantly faster to implement - e.g. instead of complete ban on targeted advertising, standardize on a clientside API that can send a list of topics/themes that are interesting to the person. In a way that's not owned by a single corporation.

This way I feel there will be less legislative and lobbying pushback while still achieving major privacy wins.

4. SahAssar ◴[04 Mar 21 19:07 UTC] No.26346701[source]▶
This is not about banning ads or analytics.