Our great sponsors
-
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
See https://github.com/WICG/floc
> Is it be possible to disable?
"A site should be able to declare that it does not want to be included in the user's list of sites for cohort calculation. This can be accomplished via a new interest-cohort permissions policy." For a per-user opt out, a browser extension could easily block it.
> Will they be releasing the datasets for how these ML models are constructed?
"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."
This code will be in the browser, which is open source.
> Do sites in "incogito mode" contribute to analysis?
"All sites with publicly routable IP addresses that the user visits when not in incognito mode will be included in the POC cohort calculation."
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
Yep, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...
Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hurt them, because it allows them to thread the needle in a privacy-conscious world.
> and you know my IP address
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb... links to https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness for how they intend to handle this.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
This is a misunderstanding of what these cohorts are. If you read the [FLEDGE readme](https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/master/FLEDGE.md) you can see that there are multiple types of owners of cohorts that fall into 3 categories:
1. Advertisers - who would add you to a cohort they own, so say "Nike - womens-running-shoes"
2. Publishers - who'd want these cohorts to better allow for advertisers to advertiser on their site, so "NYTimes - business-section-reader"
3. Third party ad-tech companies looking to create audiences for advertisers who work with them, so "Example Agency - mens-formal-wear". They'd partner with publishers so that when you go to somewhere like GQ or Man of Many and read an article on tuxedos then you'd get added to the cohort.
So you are right, you'd never see a prompt to add in your interests, but this isn't because Google doesn't want to associate with specific brands, it's that Google isn't necessarily an owner of a cohort (though they totally could create their own under any 3 of those categories).
Related posts
- Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox
- Bypass Paywalls repository is gone
- The existence of a new kind of magnetism has been confirmed
- Times Article
- Sega of America CEO Shuji Utsumi on VF: “We are evaluating right now. Virtua Fighter doesn’t use so many tricks, special moves like in Street Fighter, it’s very realistic [...] How can we make it more dramatic? It’s something we’re working on.”