topics VS floc

The browser keeps track of he top 5 categories from this list of these 629 topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before.

Delete Chrome.

“The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.”

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

Those are the top-level categories. Each of them has subcategories which are more granular. Not all of them are public, from what I can tell. Here's an example of some that are. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

>knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that?

If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Every week of your 5 topics that gets selected there is a 5% chance that a topic in replaced with a random one. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these women clothing sites hoping that one of your future website visitors would see your ad.

> You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial.

And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this.

As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3]

Do not assume any good intent on Google's part when it comes to Google's business interests. Their intent is always malicious until proven otherwise. And there have been fewer and fewer cases when they have been proven otherwise.

[1] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5680923054964736

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622

[3] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics

> [0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Nice v1 at the end. We can assume that this list is final and will not be changed?

> nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII.

Yeah, it just exposes interest in family planing, loans, ..., which we do know have absolutely no potential for abuse.

Or given the attempts to outlaw drag there is probably no potential way to use interest in Nail Care or Makeup in a negative fashion, right?

> Yes, if you assume the people who designed this API were idiots

I assume they are getting paid well to play the role.

It's related to Google's Topics API proposal, I guess. This new API automatically categorizes users into pre-defined "topics" that are inferred by the browser through a classifier model (basically matching the hostname with the classifier model). So, in the end, advertisers sent ads for these topics, and users within shall see them).

Don't take my word for it: WordPress treated FLoC as a security concern in 2021: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-fl...

A good overview of the context: https://digiday.com/media/we-cant-un-floc-ourselves-googles-...

More detail: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

When it comes to Topics, it's essential that there be hands on the wheel at W3C that approach the solidification of e.g. the Topics taxonomy https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... from a neutral perspective that takes into account the various ways in which proposed topics could be dangerous, and how strongly to word the specification to prevent it from creeping in increasingly privacy-eroding ways in the future.

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.