floc
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floc | privacytools.io | |
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92 | 310 | |
928 | 3,024 | |
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1.1 | 6.8 | |
about 1 year ago | over 2 years ago | |
Makefile | HTML | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal |
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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.
privacytools.io
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Ash HN: My country is undergoing a coup, which encryption software should I use?
FYI, Privacy Guides is a shitshow. It was formerly privacytools.io[1], and in 2019, the creator[2] of privacytools.io stopped contributing[3] and a new contributor[4] immediately focused on donations[5], became the admin[6] and took control[7] of most assets, including donations but excluding the domain and Twitter account[8]. In 2021, the creator of privacytools.io launched a new privacytools.io[9] and added affiliate links[10], and the Privacy Guides team shut down r/privacytoolsIO rather than return it[11] to the creator. Like I said, a shitshow.
[1] https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io
[2] https://www.reddit.com/user/BurungHantu
[3] https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/commits?auth...
[4] https://github.com/jonaharagon
[5] https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/commits?afte...
[6] https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/commit/4b60a...
[8] https://twitter.com/privacytoolsIO
[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/raftz6/i_made_...
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Top Android Phones From China Are Packed With Spyware, Research Finds
Yes, we know you're still mad we won't add Threema. It was thoroughly discussed in our old organization.
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L'Europe se dirige vers une fermeture de Facebook après que l'Irlande a déclaré qu'elle envisage d'empêcher Meta d'envoyer les données des utilisateurs européens vers les États-Unis
en 2019: Signal has copious privacy issues making it unfit for privacytools.io endorsement.
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Is Signal %100 open source?
Signal is just another walled garden and has a lot of other problems too: https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779
- Why is it a good idea to stay updated and avoid unsupported releases
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Lukol – A “Privacy” Search Engine
Or the fork which is much more active these days https://docs.searxng.org/
In the past it Lukol served Google Ads: https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/1557#...
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Will mu4e+mbsync not work for Gmail after this month?
Never heard of it. Fastmail apparently never made it on to the privacytools.io list for its geographical location. See here for some other recommendations. There are also malifence and posteo. I use posteo and mailbox.org. The main two weird things about posteo is that there is no spam folder (detected spam is rejected with no option to change this), and you can't use a custom domain (because they don't want to have any information on you/your name). Mailbox.org can optionally reject spam and lets you use your custom domain. I like it a lot so far.
- How Signal keep his independency
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Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly
The correct link is https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/pull/657
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All privacy tools we recommend on a single page
Worth noting the "admins" of that site wrote the content for it, check for yourself https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/commits/master BurungHantu hadn't written anything really since 2016.
What are some alternatives?
bypass-paywalls-chrome - Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
privacyguides.org - Protect your data against global mass surveillance programs.
ungoogled-chromium-archlinux - Arch Linux packaging for ungoogled-chromium
brave-browser - Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.
uBlock - uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.
nitter - Alternative Twitter front-end
chromium - The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source
BlockTheSpot - Video, audio & banner adblock/skip for Spotify
AmIUnique - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
libreddit - Private front-end for Reddit
bromite - Bromite is a Chromium fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!
Pi-hole - A black hole for Internet advertisements