What can we do against Google’s upcoming new tracking technology?
Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.
While I apprechiate EFF’s attempt to call on Google’s microscopic ethical and moral conscience, we all know they care more about their profit. In other words, not gonna happen.
Here’s an excerpt from their github page, (github.com/wicg/floc): “It would be better for privacy if interest-based advertising could be accomplished without needing to collect a particular individual’s browsing history. We plan to explore ways in which a browser can group together people with similar browsing habits, […]”.
This is literal doublespeak; they saw they are trying to achieve one thing, in this case to not pry into people’s browsing histories, and then say that they are going to do the exact opposite, by implementing something that is absolutely dependent on analyzing people’s browsing histories. Pretty wild.
I often use a fork of chromium called Brave, which is pretty decent, and there’s a great fork of firefox called ‘LibreWolf’ which I’m using now. Hopefully google won’t mess up the open-source part of Chrome, and Brave will still be a viable browser.
To offer my opinion on the question you asked, I’ll say that your best bet with this is to boycott google, and use an open-source browser that you know for a fact does not have this ‘Federated Learning of Cohorts’ spyware implemented. In this regard, google is much like a particularly undisciplined toddler, who by never receiving any meaningful consequences for their misbehavior has been taught they can do whatever they want. The difference in the toddler though, is that they can be given the benefit of the doubt. The toddler does not yet have the capacity to truly understand the impact of their actions. Google is sociopathic.
…who is 15 meters tall, and heavily armed to boot. Which is why I was motivated to come find /e/ and figure out the whole degoogling thing. I just wish it was an easier process. It was either find Godzilla or find a hole to hide in.
But, on topic, if FLoC is now being used on their own browser, I can’t see them not pushing for it to be standard on the entire internet. Many sites now don’t work properly if you don’t allow cookies. How much worse will it be when every page has to be FLoC’ed in order to load? I assume the /e/ team (and more tech-savvy users) will work on the problem more once it actually becomes more of a problem, which it’s not yet.
I have try the “Cover my tracks” tool on the EFF website and it appears that Brave is the only browser I tried that hasn’t an unique fingerprint. And Brave team communicates about their refusal of FLoC implement in Brave.
As far as I understand, FLoC is based on Fingerprinting so we should find good solutions to protect privacy and staying “low profile” in the same time. By “low profile”, I mean that a highly privacy oriented tuned version of Firefox is very unique and leave a very specific fingerprint that ruins all effort of privacy. Brave, out of the box, is well privacy oriented and used by a lot of people, leaving a randomized fingerprint.
It would be great if some of you who had good results with the EFF " Cover my tracks" tools can share them ?
