Except with FLOC you can watch your network connection in/out and see that, instead of a persistent identifier being used to track you, you only send your interest categories. FLOC's intent is to keep their money making operation afloat, but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users.
Not sure why it is supposed to be significant improvement.
"FLoC cohorts will comprise thousands of users each, so a cohort ID alone shouldn’t distinguish you from a few thousand other people like you. However [a tracker now] only has to distinguish your browser from a few thousand others (rather than a few hundred million). In information theoretic terms, FLoC cohorts will contain several bits of entropy—up to 8 bits, in Google’s proof of concept trial. This information is even more potent given that it is unlikely to be correlated with other information that the browser exposes. This will make it much easier for trackers to put together a unique fingerprint for FLoC users."
"as your FLoC cohort will update over time, sites that can identify you in other ways will also be able to track how your browsing changes [...] a FLoC cohort is nothing more, and nothing less, than a summary of your recent browsing activity."
> but this time without direct web browsing activity tracking of users.
Your FLOC cohort is a summary of your web browsing activity. FLOC doesn't solve the privacy problems that trackers create - it just hands them your browsing history on a silver platter.
It cuts down the fingerprint to a pool of just a few thousand and then you can just use other fingerprint items to get down to a completely unique id that you can track.
It's similar to Spectre. We had more pressing issues back then. As those issues are solved, we moved to more tricky ones which did not get much attention before.
You're going to drive yourself crazy if you try to make sense of "privacy"-advocate objections on an object level. It's not actually about privacy. No matter how much FLoC or something FLoC-like preserves your actual privacy, advocates will be against it. That's because they don't actually care about privacy and have always used concerns about "privacy" as a pretext for killing ads.
Then fix fingerprinting. "But fingerprinting!" is yet another pretext for just trying to make advertising in general non-viable for aesthetic or ideological reasons.
True, we have to make advertising non-viable, that's the point.
Id gladly pay for my content just to watch the ad-tech industry die, its not just about "ads", they are building the infrastructure for the surveillance police state.
There are no specifications about what the cohorts will be, Google is literally leaving that for the ad companies to figure it out. It wouldnt be suprising it at all they realize a way to make small enough cohorts in such a way you can be fingerprinted.
The bottom line is that you are giving them your browsing data, obfuscated by fancy algorithms. Unless you trust ad-tech to have the best interests about your privacy (ha!)
