We have met the enemy and they live in our browser!

[gunug]

I'm certain I'm getting too old for this stuff, the arms race to sell us stuff is heating up!

"Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.

Google’s pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the “privacy sandbox”) will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea"

[gunug]

This seems to be tools to let you be the enemy yourself!

https://developers.googleblog.com/2021/03/announcing-flutter-2.html

[Xairbusdriver]

Apple and Google have been in combat for some time. Apple has announced new protections from cookies, especially from third-parties. Google has even announced it will stop using cookies... in a couple of years! So they put their programmers to work in designing a different way to collect and monetize the data we literally give them whenever we use their apps. "There (still) ain't no free lunch." Even if we are addicted to FB, Tweet, What's DUH?, etc.

More FLOC details.

[Xairbusdriver]

Another explanation of why FaceBook (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, any other FB app) is fighting with Apple.

Former Facebook insiders explain
FaceBook's "problem" with Apple

Just a reminder of how much you "pay" for these "free" apps.