floc
ip-blindness
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floc | ip-blindness | |
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92 | 7 | |
928 | 115 | |
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1.1 | 0.7 | |
about 1 year ago | about 1 year ago | |
Makefile | ||
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | - |
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floc
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Google starts trialing its FLoC cookie alternative in Chrome.
Draft: https://github.com/WICG/floc
- Chrome vulnerability reported for 3.2 billion users
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[D] Google FLoC and Topics API suspiciously similar.
"The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop a cohort based on the sites that an individual visits. The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors. The central idea is that these input features to the algorithm, including the web history, are kept local on the browser and are not uploaded elsewhere — the browser only exposes the generated cohort." Source: https://github.com/WICG/floc
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Will a VPN help me? And is Kape Technologies ruining everything?
Google (or other third-party tracking) is also not effected by VPN. These groups use cookie syncing to assign you a unique ID and then collect this ID again as you browse the internet. That buyerID can then be cross-referenced (even with other buyerIDs) to generate all sorts of different demographic/psychographic information and used to fingerprint your online life for audience targeting. Google actually is in the works to take this a step forward with the FloC experiment. FloC (Federated League of Cohorts) actually deprecates the Set-Cookie header in favor of in-browser history scanning. Basically, in a year or two they plan to incorporate Chrome into their adtech stack and have it report your history/behavior to Google (regardless of whether you save history or not). Here is some good info on that: https://github.com/WICG/floc
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Google Play Services now lets you delete your advertising ID when you opt out of ad personalization
Instead they propose new standards, like HTML Imports or FLoC, and the W3C decides as a whole whether or not they become official standards.
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Google considers switching FLoC to a topic-based approach
With cross-site cookies, adnetwork.com has full information about what sites you've visited (among sites that incorporate their cookies). This isn't good either! But generally speaking, an individual site using adnetwork.com for advertising won't have or want access to that vector of your interests; many site operators don't even have visibility into what ads win real-time bidding, just that they're receiving money for providing their inventory. Certainly there are players that can provide demographic targeting metadata to site operators, but to my knowledge they are less widely known and certainly not cheap, and I imagine (or hope) any players with wide enough cookie reach would be discouraged from maintaining a database that could associate metadata with PII.
With FLoC, though, the idea was that the browser would provide document.interestCohort() and the individual site's JS could react accordingly: https://github.com/WICG/floc . This means that any site, regardless of its contracts with ad networks, could immediately identify your cohort and associate it with your activity. Web developers working in good faith would be encouraged to have user.cohort or user.topic fields from day one "just so you have it" - imagine all the ways someone could use this in bad faith. Inevitably this data would leak (or be intentionally leaked) and could trivially become a target list for doxxing closeted people. It's a dangerous, dangerous proposal.
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Trying to understand Addressability (for native mobile, and in general)
You can't find any info about this because there isn't really any. Josh Karlin, who is the maintainer of the FLoC working document, said at an event that it might make sense to swap to topics. It's essentially just reducing the entropy of the cohorts and giving them a more comprehensible (and probably less useful) taxonomy. That's all the info there is.
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Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life
https://github.com/WICG/floc explains the overall goals.
- Firefox Users Continue to Decrease Despite Proton Update
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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC
It's pretty complicated and my understanding could be wrong and definitely not an expert. All the stupid CIA-style names that keep changing don't help. Turtledove, fledge, sparrow lol.
But from what I think I know that's kind of right technically, but kind of not in terms of actual real privacy.
Yes, the actual browsing data, e.g. for the basic floc cohorts only what amazon product page you visited, is no longer 'sent' to ad networks (that's a pretty big oversimplification of how ad networks track you but for brevity). That data is parsed in your browser to generate a cohort ID for you.
But this cohort ID is exposed to the world document.interestCohort() and is what's used for targeting and tracking.
To me it seems that the cohorts are so small "thousands of people" + IP or UA it's basically the same as a semi-long lasting uuid.
Here's an image from google's site.
https://web-dev.imgix.net/image/80mq7dk16vVEg8BBhsVe42n6zn82...
It also seems like Chrome/google might be still defaulting browser settings to give themselves even more data just like they currently do?
https://github.com/WICG/floc#qualifying-users-for-whom-a-coh...
BUT when you layer on the other proposals (Fledge/Turtledove/Dovekey or whatever) - which I don't understand that much maybe someone else can explain - it seems like it basically collect this page/product level data and makes it available to DSP etc for tracking/ad serving (again if not technically 1:1 basically in consequence given the sizes of these groups).
Like one of the proposals talks about a 'trusted' key/value server which doesn't seem that different from what already happens? The original proposal wanted to move the entire ad bid/target/serve process into the browser.
ip-blindness
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Intelligent Tracking Prevention is getting even stronger by also hiding the user’s IP address from trackers on IOS 15
More here: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
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3rd party tags - Chrome
Yes, but have in mind that in a future it may not be possible. Take a look to the Gnatcatcher proposal: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
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I Work on Ads at Google
> at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP it within a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique.
Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?
> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.
> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well
Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.
Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?
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AdGuard publishes a list of 6K+ trackers abusing the CNAME cloaking technique
"Near-path NAT"[1] has been suggested as a mechanism that browsers can use to proxy requests through an intermediate server, similar to what you suggest.
[1] https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/near_pa...
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Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing
> and you know my IP address
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... links to https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness for how they intend to handle this.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
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Google says it may have found a privacy-friendly substitute to cookies
If you want to prevent fingerprinting, you need to look at where the identifying bits are coming from. (ex: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/) The IP address provides enough bits to uniquely identify many users, and when combined with just a few more bits, to identify almost anyone.
TOR is one solution here, which you could potentially also describe as "adding forced MitM to every connection". The proposals in https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/near_pa... and https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/willful... have different tradeoffs than TOR, with the "TOR is painfully slow" problem being a big one.
If you have better ideas, though, I would be very interested in reading them!
What are some alternatives?
bypass-paywalls-chrome - Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
FTL - The Pi-hole FTL engine
ungoogled-chromium-archlinux - Arch Linux packaging for ungoogled-chromium
privacy-preserving-ads - Privacy-Preserving Ads
uBlock - uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.
turtledove - TURTLEDOVE
chromium - The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source
cname-trackers - This repository contains a list of popular CNAME trackers
AmIUnique - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
ads-privacy
bromite - Bromite is a Chromium fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!
stealth - :rocket: Stealth - Secure, Peer-to-Peer, Private and Automateable Web Browser/Scraper/Proxy