Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

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.

What's tracking in your definition here? Is counting display of an ad tracking? Load of an image on page? Is logging nginx entry for your page load tracking? Is responding with correct image for your browser user-agent tracking?

I'm sometimes confused what is covered under this term and I'd kinda like to know where the line here is drawn. What exactly are we talking about here?

I fear that your questions reduce the problem to the point where no answer is possible. Loading the Y Combinator logo in here is almost certainly not tracking, but loading an invisible, 1px-by-1px gif in an email almost certainly counts. It's missing the forest for the trees.

The simplest definition of tracking I can come up with is "collect data about me that can (and often, is) used to build a profile of me and my behavior". The NGinx log could or could not be tracking, depending on whether you use it to diagnose issues ("we should optimize this picture, it's loading too slow for too many people") or to profile me ("ID 12345 uses a 56K modem, let's sell him a new one"). But no perfect definition exists because everyone has different thresholds of what they are okay with.

If I understand FloC correctly though, it sends your profile/tags/interesting topics from your owned client software. So this basically means that if you have a browser like Firefox, it could send a preset cohort set to server that doesn't build your tracking profile and gives you things you're interested in.

To me this seems like a win? It allows you as a person to control how your ad profile is built (and if it's sent at all) and doesn't send your data to servers anymore?

(Please correct me if I misunderstood the technology.)

Personally, what I'm interested in is not seeing ads. I think the notion that more relevant ads are somehow better for the user is mostly industry propaganda. Ad targeting is about finding people more susceptible to manipulation into spending money. User satisfaction is at best an epiphenomenon of the ad industry, and at worst is directly counter to their goals.

If you don't want to see ads, why not run an adblocker or avoid visiting sites that show ads? There's no good option right now, if you have a paywall people will complain and almost no one will visit your site, and if you have any ads at all people will complain about that too. (I remember an HN article about a guy who had a banner advertising his own product on his personal blog, absolutely no tracking, that got added to uBlock adblocking lists.)

If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?

Personally, I want the advertising industry to not exist. Moral question of for-profit manipulation aside, I think if you look at net societal benefits versus total cost, it's pretty easy to see that we could find better things to do with the ~$1 trillion that it consumes. That day won't come any sooner just by me running an ad blocker.