Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

I don’t understand the line of logic here. What does nostalgia for the internet of twenty years ago have anything to do with the way big advertising takes advantage of us now?

They use underhanded, arguably immoral, technological tricks that most general internet users might not even be aware of, much less understand how to defend themselves. It has nothing to do with the fact they never experienced the ‘old’ internet, they just don’t understand how or why they are being taken advantage of.

The HN crowd isn’t mad about obscene privacy practices because of nostalgia. They’re mad about it because they understand the actual technological mechanisms behind it, and how they work. And why the way big advertising exploits those mechanisms is so f’ed up.

Edit: Sorry, maybe I’m getting too angry. I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology. I think they just have no idea how or why it works.

I think many people are confused and frustrated that seemingly every random site or social media app they use seems to be aware of everything they do and look at online.

Besides encouraging people to buy things you might think they don't need, what's an actual harm people experience from targeted ads as opposed to non targeted ads?

I guess the choice could be fine, but the simple fact that every year it gets harder and to harder to opt is terrifying.

And perhaps the terrifying privacy implications of such a system.

If I see an ad for healing crystals on some rando website, then I just think the website is stupid.

When I saw one on Facebook I was insulted, because Facebook thinks I am the kind of person who is so stupid they believe in them. You can write this of as not actual harm because it is only emotions, but it had a negative impact on me, which I consider actual harm.

The other issue is information leakage. If you want to show an article on your phone to a buddy you don't want the ads to be for adult diapers.

Personally I think that's one of the worst things you can do to a person: manipulate him into wanting more things. I fucking hate ads

(Disclaimer: I've been working in adtech for over 15 years.)

Advertisers and publishers don't really want tracking and data collection. It carries huge costs (technical as well as social) with very little benefit for advertising. Advertisers want statistically significant and unbiased population samples, and that's not something you can arrive at by blindly throwing more data at it.

Data collection by Google et al., is really because they eventually want to pivot from adtech to govtech - think "social credit" or "Minority Report". From their vantage point of course it's a much more lucrative and advantageous place to be than a mere seller of internet clickbait.

Former gambling addict and current mental health advocate here. For anyone with an addiction or a serious mental health problem, targeted advertising can be very dangerous.

Think about the “filter bubble” effect that we experience on platforms like YouTube where we are always being “recommended” content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.

Targeted advertising is no different except that it follows you across multiple devices and multiple online platforms in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder.

This might be fine if you are a capable, healthy and intelligent individual seeing ads for computer parts or shoes. What about the recovering alcoholic who is being “targeted” by alcohol advertising? Or the homeless schizophrenic girl I worked with a while ago who couldn’t escape a constant barrage of ads for highly addictive online gambling products?

Our brains are all wired differently and not everyone has the same level of “free will” as you do. The entire purpose of the advertising industry is to push you away from reasoned decision making and towards compulsive consumption.

As adtech becomes better at exploiting our psychological weaknesses and influencing human behaviour, I worry that we will not only see an increase in negative outcomes for the most vulnerable among us - but also an increase in mental illness among the general population as our borderline, compulsive and narcissistic traits are enabled and encouraged by soulless algorithms.

Just to add to this; I've been sober for a number of years and I remember reading about how alcohol companies specifically target people in recovery. After reading this, the targeted ads on TV and in magazines became very apparent. Knowingly contributing to ruining people's lives.

When ad-tech is mentioned we are not just talking about selling toothbrushes or cat food, its about how this technology can be used by companies and special interests groups to do damage to society, say for instance trying to target people who might be more likely to listen to an ideology that would inevitably fail our democracies.

The Cambridge analyticas and the Russian bots happened because the average internet user was not paying attention to ad tech.

We need better education around ad tech, we need more people to understand what these ad companies are enabling so more average internet users can stay better protected, and make better and more informed choices.

I know for a fact this happens. Gambling companies often buy marketing data from porn websites and MLM schemes in order to better target people with “impulse control issues”.

Kudos to you for your recovery and sobriety!

I think OP’s just trying to say that we’re the vocal minority - Google has literally billions of users yet HN gets ten million or so unique monthly viewers[0] (my estimate from 2015 stats). I think we’re nostalgic but for different reasons than what OP suggests - that is, we want a web not driven purely for profit at the expense of privacy (and whether or not FLoC solves this is discussed elsewhere in the comments).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098

Your point is very convincing, but it would be great to first have a more quantifiable view (beyond anecdotal) on whats going on and second have an idea what to do about/against it. I still believe that the societal/collective memory will eventually find the best way to deal with these challenges. I hate the consensus (here on HN) that people are just too dumb to deal with it on their own and take responsibility for it.

Ads, tracking, and SEO content: promote low-quality information, allow all kinds of bad actors to profit from bad behavior, promote the use of adware, give economic advantage to actors who have access to big data, create market assimetries, waste my time and attention, make me stressed due to the need of locally filtering barrages of bad, dangerous, or malicious information targeted at me, put my wellbeing in danger because bad information is targeted at people around me that have influence over my everyday life.

TLDR: The ad industry promotes shit content, finances fake news, and wastes my resources.

The whole surveyance thingie and underhanded data gathering with all the implications when it comes to my privacy really seems mighty bad.

I dislike that the burden of proof is put on the targets of this style of advertisement instead of on the companies themselves. There are plenty of studies on the impact of propaganda and advertisement on society and individuals. In the meantime I will continue to recommend the use of ad blockers and pi-hole.

You are saying you'd rather be better targeted?

For myself, I enjoy their failures. It's better to be wrongly identified.

And that ad for adult diapers alongside another for a plausibly deniable grape de-seeding utensil... More entropy FTW!

That sounds to me more like an argument for banning alcohol/gambling ads.

What about ads for high-interest credit cards? What about ads for free-to-play video games? The list goes on...

I don't understand the argument. If they're harmful enough, you ban them. If they are not, presumably you accept their existence? If you ban targeting instead, you just increase the cost of all ads, the ads from your list still reach those vulnerable individuals. This feels like an inefficient, weird and indirect tax?

> I think I see what you were going for, about many HN frequenters pining for the days of old. But I don’t agree with the idea that general internet users who weren’t online back then are okay with the current state of big advertising tracking technology.

Yeah, my original post is not very clear about this. I'm not trying to argue that general modern internet users like the targeted advertising ecosystem. Instead, reading through some of the discussions here -- and past discussions of similar topics -- many of them at some point feature one user saying "tbh, i think it's fine if getting rid of targeted ads means losing a lot of revenue, because the old internet did just fine without all that revenue". But "how appealing is the old internet to modern internet users?" is a different question. And it's one where, I think, HN users overestimate the number of people that agree with them. My overall suggestion is that it's good to check whether or not this assumption is getting made somewhere along the way in these kinds of arguments, because I think for a lot of HN users, it is getting made.

It's not just the ads. Do you actually trust the company that has personally identifying information about you? Do you trust the people working at said company? Any time you have information about someone, you can use it for nefarious purposes.

> As described above, FLoC cohorts shouldn’t work as identifiers by themselves. However, any company able to identify a user in other ways—say, by offering “log in with Google” services to sites around the Internet—will be able to tie the information it learns from FLoC to the user’s profile.

I agree, gambling and alcohol ads should be banned. I personally would never work on them. There are categories of vice products that the law treats differently in many mediums.

I don't see why the existence of alcohol should mean SaaS software companies shouldn't be able to reach their target market with ads.

The question of “How appealing is the old internet to modern modern internet users?” certainly is a totally different question. And one completely unrelated the the topic of the article. Which is the difference between 3rd party tracking cookies versus Google’s new proposal of FLoC.

I suspect you might be right. Modern internet users probably do prefer the ‘new’ web to the ‘old’ web.

As someone who experienced the ‘old’ web and the ‘new’ web I wouldn’t disagree. The old web mostly sucked. Everything looked like shit, and I certainly much prefer the more advanced, more pleasing looking websites of modern times.

But we don’t all have nostalgia for the old web because it looked good. It’s because it was new, and exciting, and we were all using dial-up modems. It was the ‘wild west’.

But that’s all unrelated to the topic at hand, general internet users being target and exploited, against their will. I need to look into FLoC more, as the concept is still new to me. On the surface it at least sounds marginally better. But only if it is easy to deny sites access to my local sandboxed data. If every website presents me with a pop up to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ access to my FLoC data, similar to the GDPR cookie pop ups we’ve become accustomed to, I’d probably accept that as a small ‘win’.

But as it stands now, most of my friends and family when I ask them, are frightened and confused as to how every freaking place they go on the web, somehow knows about the stuff they searched on Google last week. The feeling of some obscure, all knowing power, tracking their every move online is stressful.

I try to instruct them on ways they can protect themselves. They are mostly easy, and have negligible downsides, but they are not immediately obvious to people outside the HN crowd.

The main things I recommend are A) Use Firefox B) Use 1.1.1.1 (free) or similar VPN service C) Do most of your search’s in DuckDuckGo.

That’s not a foolproof strategy, but it’s one that is super easy, and only takes the effort of downloading a few new apps. These steps alone will cause any user to very quickly to regain a huge amount of privacy, stop seeing targeted ads, and their overall internet experience will be virtually indistinguishable.

Thank you! It's not something I ever talk about, but it means a lot to hear, even from an internet stranger.

I appreciate you disclosing your experience in the ad-tech industry. But I’m not sure I understand your point.

It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be? They want legit population samples versus the ‘noise’ of huge amounts of random individual use data?

But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.

> It sounds like from your experience, the concept of FLoC from the main article is exactly where Google and other want to be?

Yes, if it can be made into some objective standard, and not just another "trust me, I'm Google".

> But when they are trying to market it to us as users, as a ‘privacy win’, that’s hard to swallow when you’re saying their end goal is some sort of ‘govtech’ or ‘social credit’ system.

Yes, because Google is not just an adtech company. Obviously they are more than that. (Or at least they want to be.)