Google dumps interest-based ad system for another interest-based ad system Google has given up on Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a categorization system for serving interest-based ads, and replaced it with Topics, a categorization system for serving interest-based ads. Caught between the push to do something about cookie-based tracking and the counter-revolution to get regulators to keep third …
"With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like 'Fitness' or 'Travel & Transportation,' that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history"
Well, how about you just display your list of topics and let me pick the ones I want to see ads for? No need to phone home with my browsing history or devise clever algorithms.
Users might even opt in to a system like that....
Users might even opt in to a system like that....
Are you sure? If you inform the user properly about the consequences and give the default option "none of the above" (i.e. opt out), what chance do you have that anyone would want to opt in?
Honesty is one thing the advertising branch does practice. They would expose their creepiness if they did and nearly everybody would run away fast. The (targeted) advertising branch is using you to push and sell more stuff nobody wants or needs and effectively promotes destructive consumerism. Do we need more wolf disguised in sheep's skin?
"Honesty is one thing the advertising branch does practice. They would expose their creepiness if they did and nearly everybody would run away fast."
Are you sure about that? What if people heard the unvarnished truth AND EMBRACED IT? Sort of like the praise someone got for bragging he could shoot someone in broad daylight and not get in trouble...
Just, the browser processing your history to extract "topics" ends to know mostly everything about you. And you have no assurance that it doesn't report everything to its "creators". Once again this is a move to create a Google silo where only the Eye of Google sees all the data and others have to pay Google to access the herds they wish to sell something too. That's "privacy" only in the meaning that your data becomes Google's private property.
I don't know about that. My experience leads me to believe that the advantage to the seller of being "first to show" is a slight increase in the profit margin. It increases the chance that the user will click-to-buy before shopping around. Amazon definitely uses that tactic; even in a normal search more expensive items tend to be shown first. Further searches with the same keywords on the same Amazon site at a later time will expand the range.
It all boils down to being in the pole position on the panopticon. If the consumer can do their own search and get an honest wide range of options with prices, they'll get a better deal.
Google's Discover feed (the swipe left from your home page, not Google News) does this and it's useful for finding new stories relevant to me. For the billions of people who use Chrome I can see this as a popular option.
I suppose advertisers have amassed this information but I'm not concerned because I tend to ignore "promoted content" and with Firefox and uBlock I don't see any ads. To me Google's attempts it are worth it because it eliminates cookies. Being paranoid, I automatically delete all cookies every time I close Firefox.
Let's face it, there will never be a "don't show any ads" in Google
I would pick "interests" based on who I think are the slimiest schemers I want to see waste their ad money. Hurts both them and if enough people did it Google as their ads would become less effective so people would be willing to pay less for them.
So I guess NFTs would be my interest of the week right now.
Or even, and here is a crazy idea, why not target the site I'm visiting, collect their information and leave me the f' alone?
It won't be any worse than the current system.
Google can't seem to make its mind up. According to them, I am a pensioner, I have arthritis and I am at risk for shingles, oh and I should get my newborn baby vaccinated as well, while I am at it...
I'm not a pensioner, I don't have arthritis, shingles isn't an issue and I don't have a newborn baby.
Or Amazon, which can't decide just how many kitchens I have in my apartment (I bought a dishwasher from them and all I got offered for the next 6 months were further dishwashers) or how many ears I have (after I bought a new smartphone, I was getting daily offers for other smartphones).
Topics all sounds fine and dandy when described in this way, but who can trust the actual implementation? How do I know what topics my browser is flagging? How do I know that what my browser is telling me it's collecting and sending is what it's actually doing? How do I know this stuff gets deleted when they say it does? How do I know that the topics sent by my browser aren't being collated against my IP, browser name / version, OS name / version etc etc, and kept somewhere else?
The reality is that we don't, and there is no way to fix this as long as user privacy is dependent on trusting any server to respect ther privacy. The trust model has to be flipped around on it's head, where data is controlled by the user. I'm sure someone (much) cleverer than me can work on the technical details, but what is needed is something like an encrypted token with user data that automatically expires after a certain time. The user enters, controls and owns the data. If some data is required to make a site work (ie online shop or ticket booking), the site only gets the data it needs and nothing else. Users can put sites in trust categories and manage trust settings per category so they don't need to faff about with settings all the time. 3rd party sites don't get any data. And if ad networks want to get any demographic information, they have to pay the user directly. Then the user can make that choice whether to sell their data or not, instead of Google vacuuming up the data by brute force or stealth and selling it off.
Of course users also have the choice of whether they want to pay for services like gmail, google maps etc by releasing their data or by paying cash - there are no free lunches. But at least it's explicit what's going on, and Google's monstrous profits give some strong clues about what the value of the user data it collects from these 'free' services really is compared to the cost to Google of running these services.
The other thing is to stop browsers sending all the details about browser type, version, OS type and version, in fact any details about what hardware / software it's running on. A web site should not need any of this information to serve a readable webpage, that's what web standards are for! (the single concession I would make to this is whether the device is mobile or not)
Even if you click the cookie consent popup and deselect everything except 'essential' you are probably still consenting to them hoovering up data about you, including creating profiles identifying you and your household across multiple devices, and of course it isn't the website that's actually doing this, it's their 'partners' like Google and Adobe, and they probably get little of that back apart from the number of pages visited
I was scanning through my browser history the other day. 1000s of page hits on Medieval Tombs, Renaissance Art history, Heteroptera and Coleoptera insects. So what ads are they going to be showing me? Funeral Directors, and Pest control most likely. Good job I don't use google browser, or their piss poor search engine, and I have all the whitelisted sites provided by AdBlock added to the blacklisted sites.
Problem : Google senses regulatory trouble for collecting and analysing too much info on users browsing history.
Solution : Google makes users collect and analyse their own browsing history and then hand this analysis over to websites when they visit them.
When will I find the first website which bars me from visiting because I don't have this feature enabled? Because no way am I running constant analysis of my own web use locally, just so Google can make some more cash. Forget cryptojacking, this is adjacking.
Or maybe (more likely) you just don't care.
I do not give you permission to collect any of my browsing history. I do not want to see advertising, targeted or otherwise.
Being able to adapt and realise new solutions to challenges is a sign of intelligence. Repeatedly flogging a dead horse because
you can't think of a different approach is not.
It looks like you are interested in male grooming products. Beard care. Would you like to buy a razor?
So you ignore the Do Not Track option in my browser. Install files that you later use (without my permission) and wonder why your computers are banned from MY NETWORK!!!!!
Both FLoC and Topics, he [Brave's Peter Snyder] contends, hurt privacy and competition.
Yeah but the "competition" hurts privacy equally, and maybe more. I say maybe more because it seems to be more likely that fly-by-night data congregators will sell data to uncouth organizations.
Cookie AutoDelete is of course also available for Firefox (and MS Edge).
I dare say that if you willingly use Google Chrome, you sort of deserve what you get (like their forthcoming deliberate removal of some APIs which currently help to allow privacy add-ons to properly protect your privacy).
I think that Google uses quite complex algorithms for analysis. Personally, I like that when I looked at a product, then I see its advertisement. In reality, with the help of advertising, I find out about interesting offers and then I’m already looking for a place where this product is sold cheaper.
"With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like 'Fitness' or 'Travel & Transportation,' that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history,"
What the fucking Fuck?
WTFingF is *any* browser doing "determining" anything at all "based on your browser history"?
Fetch HTML. Render HTML. That's it.
-A.
Let us use the example of a family computer, sitting in a corner of the living room, that is used by anyone at any time with no individual accounts.
Little Timmy surfs for RawBlocks stuff; Little Suzy looks for sparkly vampire stuff; Mom has a recipie addiction that causes her to browse foreign sites to scrape potential new foods to try; Dad only does his banking & accounting sites. So how will the browser know what stuff to serve to whom?
Then one of Mom's drinking buddies comes over while the kids are at school, mom is on the phone talking to her bookie, so friend starts surfing porn. Will the browser then start serving up smut to the kids thinking it proper?
The browser can't keep the different surfing habits separate unless the individual users have individual accounts *and always properly log in/out of their account every time*, so how will said browser makers handle "one computer used by multiple people" situations?
You're getting into IYODF territory, as this is akin to letting the kids use an unfiltered web browser. At some point, responsibility will have to kick in.
However, having said that, some parents can't handle that responsibility, leading to a dilemma over who handles abdicated responsibility.
Based on the adverts Google slings at me it obviously thinks my interests are "Switch Bikes", "Huel" and its competitor brands, "Civilization building games" with cartoon like graphics and bizarrely "Pipetting Robots". Needless to say I don't ever ride a bike, eat that meal replacement stuff or play those types of games and the closest I come to a pipetting robot is seeing them on the news when they are in a lab that is doing some sort of health related testing. No matter how hard Google try I'm not going to set up a business using pipetting robots that I commute to on my Switch Bike, only eating Huel and relaxing after a busy day playing low quality Civilization rip off games. Fortunately for Google this isn't a problem as they get paid for slinging the ads regardless.
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