webmonetization VS floc

From https://webmonetization.org/ :

> Web Monetization provides an open, native, efficient, and automatic way to compensate creators, pay for content, and support crucial web infrastructure.

> Why Now?: Until recently, there hasn't been an open, neutral and cost-efficient protocol for transferring money. Interledger provides a simple, interoperable, and currency-agnostic method for the transfer of small amounts of money.

> Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.

W3C Interledger Protocol works with any type of ledger.

From "Anatomy of an ACH transaction" (2023)

Coil tried to do that for a couple of years.

https://www.coil.com/

There's even a micro payments api in the works.

https://webmonetization.org/

W3C Web Monetization: https://webmonetization.org/ :

> The Web Monetization API allows websites to automatically and passively receive payments from Web Monetization-enabled visitors.

From https://interledger.org/faq/ :

> Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard. Using the Interledger Protocol, the Web Monetization proposed standard aims to make it easier for web creators to generate income from their work without relying on advertising, site-by-site subscriptions or tracking models.

Interledger was contributed to W3C and has undergone significant major revision. FWIU, W3C Interledger Protocol is a W3C spec but by producing IETF-style numbered RFCs, their process differs slightyl from the W3C WG Working Group model (with a page, a mailing list; and one or more git Repositories with Issues: github,com/orgname, github,com/orgname/readme, github,com/orgname/orgname.github.io ).

It's been a couple years since Dev.to hosted the Grant for the Web hackathon, a month-long sprint to develop innovative projects with Web Monetization. Web Monetization is a proposed JavaScript API that allows browsers to create payment streams directly to websites, allowing for micropayments and unlocking exclusive content on a pay-per-use basis. It's still being incubated at the Web Incubator Community Group, but it's an active project and an exciting technology.

To support the open content creators there could be a sister site where authors can post or list the link to their openly-licensed content listed with donations or web monetization to give to Wiki. I put an offer on the Reward board in line with Safe Harbor#2_important_topics) paid-article policies. The upcoming grants of the 2030 Movement Strategy go toward sustainability, accessibility, and bridging content gaps. There are risks in introducing monetization. I see it as worthwhile to experiment with as there might be extensive potential benefits. What are your thoughts?

Web monetization - People can help creators by just reading their content.

To enable more developers to build open, transparent, and impactful payment systems for the world, opportunities for rapid prototyping and an enabling environment for rapid prototyping are key. That is why Coil will be a many Hackathons this year. In partnership with Major League Hacking (MLH), Coil will support developers to brainstorm and build payment solutions that connect existing and future rails so that no one is left behind, regardless of their location. Developers participating at 30+ MLH Weekend Hackathons will have an opportunity to build with Interledger, Rafiki, and Web Monetization. They will also get mentorship from developers at Coil, Interledger, and the broader Interledger, Web Monetization, and Grant for the Web communities.

Check https://webmonetization.org that's actually a perfectly fine solution. You like something and want to support people who work hard to make it? Why not pay them? Doesn't sound crazy to me.

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.