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Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

(www.eff.org)
604 points wyldfire | 39 comments | 04 Mar 21 15:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.787s | source | bottom
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dleslie ◴[04 Mar 21 16:49 UTC] No.26344736[source]▶
This captures my feelings on the issue:

> That framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

I don't want to be tracked. I never have wanted to be tracked. I shouldn't have to aggressively opt-out of tracking; it should be a service one must opt-in to receive. And it's not something we can trust industry to correct properly. This is precisely the role that privacy-protecting legislation should be undertaking.

Stop spying on us, please.

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1. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 17:39 UTC] No.26345398[source]▶
Do you use Web Monetisation ( as in, pay)? If you don't, and don't want to be tracked for ads, how do you propose things work?
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2. chipgap98 ◴[04 Mar 21 17:41 UTC] No.26345418[source]▶
I would much rather pay than be tracked. Unfortunately many sites don't give me that choice.
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3. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 17:47 UTC] No.26345482[source]▶
Indeed, because for many of them the only option is ads, because almost nobody uses any alternatives ( the only one i know of is Web Monetization). Until it's massively used, few site owners will make the effort.
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4. shawkinaw ◴[04 Mar 21 17:50 UTC] No.26345534[source]▶
You can have ads without tracking. Print, radio, TV all do this.
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5. bozzcl ◴[04 Mar 21 17:51 UTC] No.26345560{3}[source]▶
So you're saying it's not worth trying moving in that direction, just because people don't use it now?
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6. esperent ◴[04 Mar 21 17:52 UTC] No.26345567[source]▶
Do you mean this?

https://webmonetization.org/

It barely exists so far and is only implemented by a single browser that I'd never heard of (Puma). Hardly fair to demand if people are using it yet.

> how do you propose things work?

We go back to advertising without tracking.

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7. spoonjim ◴[04 Mar 21 17:52 UTC] No.26345574[source]▶
This will never happen because the people who would pay the most to avoid targeted ad tracking are the ones who are the most valuable to advertisers (essentially, people able and willing to spend money). So when you see Facebook making $20 per user or whatever and think “I’d pay $20 to avoid being tracked,” it’s actually Facebook making nothing from a ton of users, a little from a bunch of them, and a huge amount from their “whales,” and the people willing to pay to avoid being tracked are most likely in the “whales.”
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8. potta_coffee ◴[04 Mar 21 17:53 UTC] No.26345584[source]▶
Most content is essentially worthless. I'd happily see most of it disappear.
9. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 17:53 UTC] No.26345596[source]▶
Indeed, their page doesn't make it obvious, but on a computer you can use extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Puma is the only option on mobile though ( never heard of it either).
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10. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 17:54 UTC] No.26345622[source]▶
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.
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11. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 17:55 UTC] No.26345631{4}[source]▶
Au contraire, i'm saying start using it now, and if enough people do, website owners will see the point in supporting it.
12. throwaway3699 ◴[04 Mar 21 17:58 UTC] No.26345674[source]▶
Simple answer: The sum of all online marketing dollars is more than the sum of any amount of money people would pay for online content.

That alone means direct payment will never replace ads.

Most people are not reading The Financial Times or Bloomberg, they are reading rags like The Sun and Facebook gossip. I would love for that content to go away, but really, ad supported models work great for that demographic.

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13. izacus ◴[04 Mar 21 18:07 UTC] No.26345840{3}[source]▶
Also both FT and Bloomberg are still filled up chalked full of trackers despite asking for money.
14. hobs ◴[04 Mar 21 18:09 UTC] No.26345878{3}[source]▶
And you can justify all sorts of economic activity based on deeply unethical behavior, but should you?
15. Mediterraneo10 ◴[04 Mar 21 18:23 UTC] No.26346090[source]▶
> If you don't, and don't want to be tracked for ads, how do you propose things work?

There are so many hobbies and interests where the rich, meaty information people can benefit from is found on old-school blogs and websites that their owners have maintained without expecting to make much money at all, besides the occasional click-through to an Amazon referral link.

However, those blogs and websites have now become hard to find because they have been pushed down in search results due to Google's changed algorithms and ad-supported websites heavy on SEO – sometimes those ad-supported websites are literal copies of earlier advertising-free blogs where a developing-world freelancer was paid to rewrite all the content just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown. Also, the advertising-supported world of mobile social-media apps has made people today less likely to step outside of their walled gardens and consider small third-party independent websites.

So, to a degree, things would work better in certain cases if targeted-advertising-supported websites disappeared; their decline would reveal a whole world of useful free content that was there the whole time.

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16. coldpie ◴[04 Mar 21 18:43 UTC] No.26346372{3}[source]▶
You're right, but there is a solution: make online marketing worthless. Install an ad blocker.
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17. waisbrot ◴[04 Mar 21 19:07 UTC] No.26346694[source]▶
Wikipedia is a well-known example of a vast amount of content that I can read without any tracking or targeted ads. In fact, there's very little advertising at all -- a few times a year they show me a banner asking for donations to the site.
18. folkrav ◴[04 Mar 21 19:09 UTC] No.26346735[source]▶
SEO was a thing before tracking and widespread advertising, though, and I can't see it disappear even if we somehow manage to ban those widespread tracking practices. Remember keyword stacking?

Businesses providing paid services on the internet will still want to get noticed before those free smaller websites and will do whatever they can to appear first in relevant search engines results regardless. The reasons to get people on their sites would shift from showing them ads to selling them a paid product, but reeling people in is still going to be the objective.

There are many great arguments against tracking, but IMHO, SEO isn't one.

19. reaperducer ◴[04 Mar 21 19:19 UTC] No.26346865[source]▶
don't want to be tracked for ads, how do you propose things work?

The way they've worked for the last 400 years. The ads are tailored to the content, not the individual reader.

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20. gwenzek ◴[04 Mar 21 19:22 UTC] No.26346901{3}[source]▶
Which extension ? The landing page is terrible for a prospective user.
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21. reaperducer ◴[04 Mar 21 19:22 UTC] No.26346908{3}[source]▶
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.

I do, and the amount of money webmasters made back then was much better.

Some of the sites I ran got $10-$15 CPM. Ad campaigns targeted to my sites' niches could be up to $25 CPM.

Ever since Google introduced AdWords and its race to the bottom, content-heavy web sites are lucky to get 10¢ CPM.

But since the new kids on the block have never experienced a profitable web without tracking, they don't know any better and think it didn't exist.

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22. input_sh ◴[04 Mar 21 19:24 UTC] No.26346938{3}[source]▶
Puma is a fork of Firefox that does other cool shit: it supports Handshake for DNS, uses DDG by default, and there are some mentions of IPFS that I don't know if it's implemented or not.

I have yet to play with it though, mostly because I do the vast majority of my browsing on a desktop.

23. input_sh ◴[04 Mar 21 19:25 UTC] No.26346950{4}[source]▶
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/coil/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coil/locbifcbeldmn...

I agree that their web presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

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24. dleslie ◴[04 Mar 21 19:39 UTC] No.26347130{4}[source]▶
That was a lovely time to be on the internet: there was greater incentive to create interesting and focused niche content.
25. gwenzek ◴[04 Mar 21 19:53 UTC] No.26347309{5}[source]▶
Thanks a lot. Coil looked like its own browser, and I didn't want yo use another browser. I was using a similar service in the past, but unsuscribed because most created I wanted to send money weren't receiving it.

Will look into this

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26. throwaway3699 ◴[04 Mar 21 20:10 UTC] No.26347559{4}[source]▶
I think you miss my point. Even if online advertising (as well as marketing, but that's a different concept) was completely worthless, the number of paid dollars would not go up, and the "total GDP" of the internet would go down.

If that's a desired future we should be honest about it, but it's a future without as many independent journalists who can't afford a team to sell their content, for example.

27. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 20:17 UTC] No.26347667{6}[source]▶
Yeah, it's not as obvious as it could be, i'm in the process of writing an article on the subject and how important i think it is combat ads and tracking in the long term.
28. jpalomaki ◴[04 Mar 21 20:54 UTC] No.26348148{4}[source]▶
What is already happening is that ads get embedded in the content.

Paid content, product placement, YouTubers pitching Audible book related to video.

29. ttt0 ◴[04 Mar 21 21:28 UTC] No.26348623[source]▶
I think I would be fine with paying too, but by paying you're giving up all of your personal information. Unless websites will suddenly start accepting something like Monero, I actually prefer to be tracked, as I can at least block it.
30. seanhunter ◴[04 Mar 21 21:39 UTC] No.26348773[source]▶
If a highway robber stops you and demands "your money or your life" and you object, they can't justifiably say "well if you don't pay me, how do you propose things work?"

The responsibility isn't on the user to either consent to tracking or to come up with an alternative business model that allows people to monetize things. The responsibility for monetizing things falls on the people who want to do the monetizing. They have to figure out a business model that works and that users consent to.

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31. sofixa ◴[04 Mar 21 22:31 UTC] No.26349402[source]▶
And ads work, and the vast majority of people consent to them. The problem is, they're not that good of a model
32. nl ◴[04 Mar 21 23:40 UTC] No.26350125[source]▶
There have been personalised sales channels for much longer than 400 years. But they were human sales people, and now that process is automated.
33. readams ◴[04 Mar 21 23:47 UTC] No.26350192{4}[source]▶
But AdWords isn't a race to the bottom; it's the opposite. Google's ad business is so big because Google drives so much more value than other ad targeters.
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34. minsc__and__boo ◴[05 Mar 21 00:33 UTC] No.26350698[source]▶
Car dealerships send direct mail post cards to you if you've bought from them before. Seems like individual retargeting to me.

If you've every made the buying decisions for an organization, you've been targeted individually before. Through digital economies of scale, it's less expensive to do with consumers now and allows for publishers to get paid to generate content at the same time.

replies(1): >>26352084 #
35. minsc__and__boo ◴[05 Mar 21 00:39 UTC] No.26350759{3}[source]▶
I would say with some subscription services you see the inverse of this - i.e. streaming media. IIRC youtube creators make more per view with subscribers than they do with ads, but I could be wrong.
36. xxpor ◴[05 Mar 21 01:40 UTC] No.26351350[source]▶
Blowing up a significant fraction of the world's GDP is how you start a war.
37. reaperducer ◴[05 Mar 21 01:46 UTC] No.26351392{5}[source]▶
For Google is a race to the top. But for publishers, all we get is crumbs compared to the old days.
38. winkeltripel ◴[05 Mar 21 03:08 UTC] No.26352084{3}[source]▶
> If you've every made the buying decisions for an organization, you've been targeted individually before.

Mellanox seems to think I'll drop 50k on NICs again, and I need to be reminded that last time I bought from them. It's been 11 years since.

39. sofixa ◴[07 Mar 21 14:05 UTC] No.26375916{6}[source]▶
FYI i wrote a post on the subject : https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati...