this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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I have been reading up on Chrome's new Topics API and FLoC. Can someone explain to me why it is bad? Do the negatives of FLoC also apply to Federated Learning? (I'm not saying that FLoC is good, I'm just confused.)

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[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Federated learning as a machine learning topic is unrelated to floc afaict.

The issue I have with things like FloC and the topics API are that they are attempts to keep the cash flowing at Google before disabling 3rd party cookies, when it seems obvious that the time to disable 3rd party cookies is now.

[–] tester1121@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So the features on my Pixel that use federated learning don't share the same privacy risks as FLoC?

[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think not? I'm sure it still comes with some privacy risks, plus your phone is using power you paid for to train models owned by someone else I believe. What features are you thinking of? Lol I use a pixel as well

[–] JSens1998@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

All you need to know is its a proposal by Google for a new web standard. Enough said.

[–] corrupts_absolutely@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

from my experience the description of what this is by google itself is confusing and/or misleading, so be wary

[–] reboot6675@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I think this is a pretty good breakdown and worth a read. Some key takeaways are that with FLoC Google would be able to track visitors to your website even if you were not using Google Analytics, and that the mechanism is built-in the Chrome browser so entirely controlled by Google.

Here is a related article about Topics, the FLoC replacement.