this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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I have been reading up on Chrome's new Topics API and FLoC. Can someone explain to me why it is bad? Do the negatives of FLoC also apply to Federated Learning? (I'm not saying that FLoC is good, I'm just confused.)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

It's yet another scheme to gather data about Chrome users for the benefit of advertisers. Aside from the fundamental problems with that whole idea which people most often point to, it's also underhanded in a way that cookies, tracking scripts, and browser fingerprinting aren't: It's code that's built in to the web browser itself which exists for no purpose other than to act directly against the interests of its users. It may be the first time that's happened in such an obvious and unambiguous way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Federated learning as a machine learning topic is unrelated to floc afaict.

The issue I have with things like FloC and the topics API are that they are attempts to keep the cash flowing at Google before disabling 3rd party cookies, when it seems obvious that the time to disable 3rd party cookies is now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So the features on my Pixel that use federated learning don't share the same privacy risks as FLoC?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think not? I'm sure it still comes with some privacy risks, plus your phone is using power you paid for to train models owned by someone else I believe. What features are you thinking of? Lol I use a pixel as well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Vivaldi removed it from Chromium more than 2 years ago, just like before and after all of Google's other dirty tricks to track and profile users. No serious browser, Vivaldi, Firefox or Mozilla forks, will enter the Google game.

@tester1121 so you can rest assured (as long as you don't use Chrome or EDGE or search with Google)

https://vivaldi.com/blog/no-google-vivaldi-users-will-not-get-floced/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

All you need to know is its a proposal by Google for a new web standard. Enough said.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

from my experience the description of what this is by google itself is confusing and/or misleading, so be wary

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think this is a pretty good breakdown and worth a read. Some key takeaways are that with FLoC Google would be able to track visitors to your website even if you were not using Google Analytics, and that the mechanism is built-in the Chrome browser so entirely controlled by Google.

Here is a related article about Topics, the FLoC replacement.