ichnaea VS floc

The rather troubling part of this announcement in a GitHub issue is that this nugget comes out in a seemingly innocuous comment[1]:

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

> This endpoint will be migrated to another service (classify-client) that will return the expected response. We'll adjust DNS entries when it's time to make that move so firefox won't see any difference.

What exactly is this "classify-client" service?

Note also this led me to discover for the first time that this is a thing[2]:

> Geolocation for default search engine

> In order to set the right default search engine for your location, Firefox will perform a geolocation lookup once by contacting Mozilla's servers and store the country-level result locally. This connection happens on the first start of Firefox – in case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the browser.search.geoip.url preference to a blank string.

Also related is [3].

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-...

[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/iq27wa/disabling_l...

I don't know what WiGLE users do with the data, but the WiGLE admins sold Wi-Fi location data to Microsoft to bootstrap Bing Maps back in the day.

I helped bootstrap Mozilla's Location Service (MLS) to support geolocation on Firefox OS without Google Location Services. Mozilla even had its own Wi-Fi "wardriving/stumbling" app (MozStumbler https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler) and an opt-in stumbler in Firefox Android. But once Firefox OS was retired, there wasn't much need for MLS. However, Mozilla still runs a Wi-Fi geolocation service open to other projects (like GNOME's Geoclue service).

Mozilla also publishes cell tower location data and shares with the OpenCellID stumbling project. I worked with Mozilla's privacy and security teams to see if we could publish the Wi-Fi location data, but we didn't find a privacy-preserving way to do that.

For more information about MLS, check out https://location.services.mozilla.com/

Google mainly makes a search engine deal and pays Mozilla to use Google Location services rather than Mozilla's. Google doesn't control the development of Firefox, or its browser engine Gecko (at least directly, they do maniplulate the market so other browsers are forced to implement their stuff, Manifest v3 itself being an example).

The same is possible with bluetooth. Source: Mozilla Location Services

Tower Collector, as an app, collects for both https://opencellid.org/ and https://location.services.mozilla.com/ . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla\_Location\_Service

I had used Google's Geolocation API and Mozilla Location Service in the past.

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.