If I get this right, facebook needs mozilla to get into a browser. I mean this is just a proposal how that all works but why shouldn’t mozilla work with the devil to get money, if they are already getting paid by the Beelzebub. Facebook has the ad network and mozilla has the browser.

Third party cookies will be gone in a year or so and now google and facebook are looking into different forms of advertising/tracking. Brave already tracks their users on the browser level and to me the proposals look like facebook and google want to do the same as brave. Observing all internet traffic and categorize the visited websites and creating a profile of the user to “serve relevant ads”. This means not only those sites that have third party cookies embedded but all sites are then considered to profile you.

How is google’s floc or facebook’s way privacy respecting? (Sorry mozilla, I only speak of facebook, because if you don’t play along, they’ll just create their own browser. you have no power here) The exact implementation doesn’t actually matter here. Let’s say I browse a lot of dog websites, and hence I am in the group of dog lovers, hence I’ll be served dog food ads. I don’t visit radical right wing sites, so I don’t get ads for a steel helmet. If I don’t get ads for a steel helmet, and I am not part of that group. Blabla … based on the recent 100 ads they served to me, they can categorize me and make a very good profile of me. I browse books? I must be an intellectual or whatever. They don’t get the exact website I visit, but they still keep on profiling me. They still get the relevant information. How is that any better? I think all those “intelligent” content algorithms are dangerous to our society. Profiling for ads is just the same as filtering the content of your news based on your interests. You’ll only be shown what you already like, you’ll live inside your bubble and read/see only the stuff you want to see.

Apple recently changed their privacy policy which leads to a crack in facebook’s earnings. Does apple care about the users privacy? No, but apple’s earnings aren’t affected. Apple gets more power over their users by reducing facebook’s power, nothing more.

Back to facebook. Facebook and other advertisers didn’t know I was browsing the archwiki, because there are no bloody trackers. Facebook didn’t even had me in their database. websites can opt out of floc but do all website owners know this? Facebook didn’t know that I was browsing xy websites because there were no facebook trackers. And now they are all over the place.

This all sounds hell to me. Yes I can just use a different browser, I can use librewolf. But can anyone who is not interested in IT just use another browser? No. Someone else probably doesn’t even know about librewolf and will use the first “privacy browser” that pops up.

If everything is stored on my device, the computation is done on my device, what does facebook need to do? Company “DogCo” requests facebook to show ads, and the user requests and ad for dogs. Facebook just brings them together. How does my browser actually know that dogwiki.co is about dogs? Hell, I browse on r/dogs, so facebook doesn’t even need to intercept SSL encryption to know that I am visiting dog sites. They just scan it client side and the result which would otherwise be computed on their server is done at my end. That sounds just like apple’s csam scanning in a different form. Facebook gets more information about me, can profile me much better, and reduces its own costs significantly. How genius is that?

Sorry that this is not a very polished post, I just want to know if I am on the wrong path of thinking here. Sorry for the english I am not a native and some links might not be the best sources but serve the purpose for anyone that didn’t know about it to have a quick look.

Tldr: i think that client side scanning and profiling is more privacy invasive than third party cookies.