I'm sometimes confused what is covered under this term and I'd kinda like to know where the line here is drawn. What exactly are we talking about here?
That it would independently identify you to Site A and Site B as a person in a particular cohort.
The simplest definition of tracking I can come up with is "collect data about me that can (and often, is) used to build a profile of me and my behavior". The NGinx log could or could not be tracking, depending on whether you use it to diagnose issues ("we should optimize this picture, it's loading too slow for too many people") or to profile me ("ID 12345 uses a 56K modem, let's sell him a new one"). But no perfect definition exists because everyone has different thresholds of what they are okay with.
To me this seems like a win? It allows you as a person to control how your ad profile is built (and if it's sent at all) and doesn't send your data to servers anymore?
(Please correct me if I misunderstood the technology.)
I bet if a random open source project of the same kind were released, it would probably be pointed at as a reason why Google is evil ('see there are good alternatives!'). But because Google is doing it, people are (rightly) wary and (definitely not rightly) calling it evil without doing research.
That's what happens when no one trusts you. It's human nature, and logical arguments aren't going to change that.
If anything, it's a good thing for society if Google burns despite trying to do something genuinely good (not that FLoC is good), because it shows others that there are real consequences to betraying the trust of your customers.
We lose one untrustworthy company today, and gain many trustworthy companies in the future. That's a net positive for society!
If you want you can use duckduckgo with ads disabled in settings, visit HN and wikipedia and stackoverflow (although they have the #hireme thing), pay $10/month for youtube and spotify premium so you don't see ads there, etc. And then use ghostery to disable third-party cookies and things of that nature. What more do you want the industry to do?
That would be an actual win. Not showing me ads at all would be an additional icing on the cake. I even don't want to see ads about things I'm interested in. Just nothing.
> This is precisely the role that privacy-protecting legislation should be undertaking.
If we rely on old pre digital tactics with no targeting, it's like going back 50 years and using a machine gun in the dark.
Combine the Google cookie depreciation, Apple's recent changes in 14.5 and the general mood around 3rd party data sharing which makes effective outbound lead gen more difficult. I think we are witnessing death by a thousand cuts in terms of increasing the barriers to entry for smaller business.
That's a pretty big philosophical difference.
Except it does, it tracks how many times the image was loaded. That's tracking, even if you're not getting any user specific information.
FLoC is the same, you're not getting any individual user information, but you're tracking cohorts.
Sure, google/FB and others sell that to advertisers as an advantage, but has anyone proven it works?
Google's original use of Adwords was based on my current search, didn't use my history, and didn't use anything else to identify/classify me.
Then they started adding geo location, using things like IP addresses and other out-of-band information, then cookies which allowed them to track me outside of their own site.
I don't care whether outbound lead gen is more difficult. I have no incentive to care. I have no incentive to offer my details to anyone.
Advertising has always been a manipulative business, by definition, its aim is to manipulate people into wanting to consume the product or service being advertised.
But it was constrained by the inability to target more than large demographic groups and locations.
That "pretty niche" product can still target its niche. What it can't do without the current dark patterns and tracking is target individuals. That would be a good thing.
Pre-digital tactics is not going back 50 years, it's going back 20. It's pre-9/11, pre-government-general-surveillance. That government surveillance has given tacit permission to business to do the same thing. The "if you've got nothing to hide, why are you worried about the government?" argument is applied to business now.
In short, fuck Google and FB and Amazon's need to sell targeted audiences. Their business model is flawed and has caused greater social disturbance than the overall reward.