floc VS turtledove

Draft: https://github.com/WICG/floc

"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

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

Instead they propose new standards, like HTML Imports or FLoC, and the W3C decides as a whole whether or not they become official standards.

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.

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.

https://github.com/WICG/floc explains the overall goals.

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.

it's unfortunate that the sour response to this impressive privacy work (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE_k_anonym...) will likely lead to people turning it off, and buried in their is the switch for Private State Tokens (https://github.com/WICG/trust-token-api/blob/main/README.md)

It'll be interesting to see how this goes. Google and Mozilla+Meta each have competing standards.

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attri...

To my knowledge, Mozilla's design is the only one where someone other than the browser collects & reports on click activity, and with a fairly trustless anonymizing double blind strategy for those intermediaries.

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE_k_anonym...

you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website. If FLoC works, you can still do that.

https://github.com/WICG/floc won't really let advertisers do that, this is what https://github.com/WICG/turtledove is for

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

The issue is that the replacement that are currently in the works (https://github.com/WICG/floc and https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md) are extremely complex, will still dramatically impact adtech performance and only improve privacy for a very contrived definition of the concept which incidentally benefits once again big tech vendors...

As to the effectiveness of advertising, removing tracking will have a huge impact. And this affects all players in the value chain, not only adtech providers but also publishers and more importantly advertisers which will see their return on ad spent severely impacted. There is a real of loss "social welfare" (I mean in a game-theoretic sense, but also for real if you believe in capitalism) if tracking is disabled.

Check FLEDGE initiative for this case. The mechanism has not been settled yet, but moves in the needed direction: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md#11-joining-interest-groups

I think advertising is positive [1] and the role of ads in funding freely-available sites is very important. My current work is primarily on how browsers can allow more private and secure advertising [2][3][4] which I think most people will agree is valuable even if they are less in favor of advertising in general.

At a lower level, I do this job because I'm paid, which allows me to donate. [5] But I wouldn't do this work if I thought it was harmful; there are lots of different kinds of jobs I could take.

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/effect-of-advertising

[2] https://github.com/google/fledge-shim

[3] https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/issues/161

[4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/624

[5] https://www.jefftk.com/donations

Why do Google's FLoC, TURTLEDOVE, Dovekey, Criteo's SPARROW, Magnite's PARRROT, NextRoll's TERN and Microsoft's PARAKEET all have similar bird-related names? This feels very cruel considering that in most cultures birds often symbolise freedom.