Today, Google launched an “origin trial” of Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka FLoC), its experimental new technology for targeting ads. A switch has silently been flipped in millions of instances of

Hopefully nobody here is still using chrome on personal machines, but good to know

Google’s launch of this trial—without notice to the individuals who will be part of the test, much less their consent—is a concrete breach of user trust in service of a technology that should not exist.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    3·
    4 years ago

    I mean, Mozilla did actually experiment with a similar concept, but theirs was full-on private: All possible ads got downloaded, then it was decided locally which ad to show based on the browser history.

    Admittedly, that doesn’t scale very well…