{"by":"AntiImperialist","dead":true,"id":26971136,"parent":26968453,"text":"Yes, the most important thing you should know here is that corporate "education" makes otherwise intelligent people misguided.

FLoC is an AMAZING piece of technology, specially for privacy. It doesn't need any central collection of data and yet it can help companies serve ads like its done today. Everybody wins... except some big companies which rely on central collection of private data... or don't at all and just want to hurt the advertisement industry so that they can retain more users (more on this later).

Google just wants to serve ads so they don't care about tying private data to YOU, they just want to know if you vaguely match a category, hence they want to promote the use of FLoC.

You read mostly negative sentiments against FLoC but not any detailed critique of it, because if you understood it, you wouldn't be against it... or at least not as much.

A big loss here is EFF, which has largely been the sane voice, but in this regard, they have been very shallow. Having said that, you can understand a lot about what FLoC is by reading their detailed articles on it :\nhttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...\nhttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv...

What they don't tell you is that if there is no accessible advertisement industry, we will have less free people... like the Apple users.

Apple doesn't like any other competitors advertising to their audience because they know that they are not competitive and their entire business model relies on over-charging customers and vendor locking customers into their eco-system... making it more and more difficult for them to get out of it. Microsoft has a similar foothold on the B2B market. A free market needs easy means of advertisement so that competent products can reach the masses without having to spend a lot. Long-term, FLoC is not necessarily great for Google because the profiling can be accessed by any advertiser, big or small... it democratizes ad-targeting, which is great for the free market in general, not so much for anti-free market players like Apple and Microsoft.

If the cheap ad-market is no longer viable because of companies like Apple and Microsoft suppressing it, we will have more of these vendor-locked-in users... and everyone having to rely on mass market advertising (think Super Bowl ads) which is only accessible to the already established players. So, the internet will change from a rich vibrant ecosystem into the days of newspapers and TV, like we had before, only served differently.","time":1619626918,"type":"comment"}