logica VS floc

If you're interested in this I would also recommend you check out Logica[0], which is a datalog-like language that is explicitly made to compile to SQL queries.

0: https://logica.dev/

> I guess the intention is to be better than SQL but then I was left with "under which circumstances?"

Excellent question.

Two of the most common use cases for databases are "transactional processing" (manipulating small numbers of rows in real time) and "analytical processing" (querying enormous numbers of rows, typically in a read-only fashion).

SQL is generally fine for transactional workloads.

But analytical queries sometimes involve multi-page queries, with lots of JOINs and CTEs. And these queries are often automatically generated.

And once you start writing actual multi-page "programs" in SQL, you may decide that it's a fairly clunky and miserable programming language. What Datalog typically buys you is a way to cleanly decompose large queries into "subroutines." And it offers a simpler syntax for many kinds of complex JOINs.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a standard dialect of Datalog, or even a particular dialect with mainstream traction. So choosing Datalog is a bit of a tradeoff: does it buy you enough, for your use case, that it's worth being a bit outside the mainstream? Maybe! But I'd love to see something like Logica gain more traction: https://logica.dev/

Interesting; a Google engineer previously published a Datalog variant for BigQuery: https://logica.dev/

This new language seems similar to differential-Datalog (which is sadly in maintenance mode): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33521561

Looks pretty cool. I'd be interested if the README had a comparison with Google's Logica (https://github.com/EvgSkv/logica)

Oh wow that is neat!

And yes, this kind of thing is why datalog is a lot more amenable to fast query plans & runtimes than prolog. This part is especially cool: https://github.com/EvgSkv/logica/blob/main/compiler/dialects...

Google new programming Language that compiles to SQL (Support BigQuery and Postgres) feels very exciting. Blog: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/04/logica-organizing-your-data-queries.html Github: https://github.com/EvgSkv/logica

Going to be? It already is. In fact, one thing the article misses is right there at the bottom of the project page:

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.