No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.

[stargazera5]

@stargazera5: The point of my use of the well-known Revelations 13-18 quote in my original message was that the use of numbers to identify people, particularly in the realm of buying and selling, has been feared for thousands of years. So yes, it's very easy to imagine the dangers as, from an historical point of view, it is nothing new.

[Catweazle]

It's amazing what G comes up with to 'improve user experience'.
Perhaps the following will be to deny access to the pages, if there is no user ID. I see it coming.

[LorenAmelang]

Hmmm... I remember when what became "the internet" first appeared as an alternative to Commercial Compuserve and Dialog and DJNR. It had the lofty non-commercial advantage of being run mostly by universities, but the scary history of having been developed by the military. Now big business has taken over, and lots of people are suggesting government should take control over them. I'm a bit afraid control by the "critical theorists" now "wokening" our universities would be even scarier.

What is left? Dark web? Fediverse? Metaverse?

[Catweazle]

@LorenAmelang

[anonysubscribe]

I moved from google to vivaldi recently. we need a balance between privacy and an ethical business model.

[Pesala]

@jane-n To me, it looks like floccinaucinihilipilification.

[ch3f]

for the doubters and the curious among us
https://amifloced.org

[mossman]

@WildEnte said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:

Signing up to be a member of a community (party, church, internet forum, bowling club) because I want to is something very different than being placed there by others.

When put like that it clearly sounds like a form of "-ism" stereotyping... with the whole internet being segregated by Google and set up for all sorts of discrimination. The bubble on steroids...

[stilgarwolf]

@guigirl But how long will Vivaldi be able to block this FLoC crap?

[mossman]

Just saw an article mention that DuckDuckGo is going to block FLoC for anyone using their site.

[thomasp]

@guigirl said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:

https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/

As a website owner, what can I do to avoid this?

Websites can take steps to protect the privacy of their users by opting out of FLoC, which would be applicable to all their visitors. It's done by simply sending the following Permissions-Policy HTTP response header:

Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

Some publishers like The Markup and The Guardian have already done so, as have we at DuckDuckGo Search, and we encourage others to follow.

At Vivaldi we have already done this across all of our websites by the way.

[Catweazle]

@anonysubscribe , ethical behavior begins with respect for the user. On the web there are other possibilities of doing business than treating the user as merchandise, Vivaldi is an example of this.

[code3]

@jane-n How will you make sure that FloC turned off is not used for fingerprinting? Empty cohort? I would think empty cohort would work, but maybe the amount of users are too small...

[code3]

@mossman You can see it in the developer console. Do a duck duck go search and there will be a note in the console that Vivaldi does not know of this header.

[dude99]

The major problem we are facing is currently GC have over 2/3 of global browser market share, so even if everyone else block floC, it will be just a minor lost to advertisers. Eventually, advertisers can still force this on everyone by demand floC to become mandatory for all websites they sponsoring (just like Youtube). And G will definitely help 'em to enforce this via Google Ads. Then, it will be either get floCed or get lost situation for the rest of the us.

Remember when everyone keep complaining about a lot of websites doesn't work properly in all browsers other than IE6 & Firefox? And then everyone just put all the blame on these browser makers & demand 'em to fix the "problem" repeatedly? This is going to be our future if floC allow to continue, & the only way for Chromium based browser to fix this is enabled floC.

Another solution would be hopefully EU will slap an anti-trust on Google for using monopoly in ads market to strangle the web browser market. Oh, don't bother to rely on US for this, cuz Biden is totally in bed with G since day one... I won't be surprise if he abuse his executive power to force this on all US Internet user because of "Net Neutrality". LOL

[Komposten]

@dude99 said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:

so even if everyone else block floC, it will be just a minor lost to advertisers.

The sad thing about this is that there are several (smaller) companies that have switched from personalised advertising to contextual advertising and seen increased advertising revenue, suggesting that contextual ads might be more effective. If this is true also on the bigger scale, then it suddenly makes personalised ads even worse than they already are: Why use a less optimal advertising technique, unless it provides another source of revenue (say, trade in personal information) that's large enough to cover the loss in ad revenue and the cost of the personalisation technology?

[LorenAmelang]

@code3 said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:

@mossman You can see it in the developer console. Do a duck duck go search and there will be a note in the console that Vivaldi does not know of this header.

I see:

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT  /t.js?q=floc&t=D&l=wt-wt&s=0&ct=US&ss_mkt=us&p_ent=&ex=-1&cdrexp=b&biaexp=b&msvrtexp=b:1 

That looks like Vivaldi blocking the DDG page from loading some bit of FLoC... But why is the DDG page even requesting it?

Oh... Looking in the Head:

<style class="darkreader darkreader--root-vars" media="screen"></style>
  <script type="text/javascript" async="" src="/t.js?q=floc&amp;t=D&amp;l=wt-wt&amp;s=0&amp;ct=US&amp;ss_mkt=us&amp;p_ent=&amp;ex=-1&amp;cdrexp=b&amp;biaexp=b&amp;msvrtexp=b"></script>

So extensions can include FLoC bits into a page intended to ignore them?

Error with Permissions-Policy header: Unrecognized feature: 'interest-cohort'.

So the DDG page has the "Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()" header, and Vivaldi ignores it? I guess that's more private than returning '0'?

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()  www.floc.com.ico:1

That seems to say Vivaldi asked FLoC for something they don't have. But why is Vivaldi requesting it? Maybe because of Dark Reader? But Dark Reader is also active on this Forum page, where I see none of those. So with no header or FLoC calls in the Forum page, nothing for Dark Reader to request?

I've probably misinterpreted all of this... But I'd like to understand before I add that header to my website!

[Komposten]

@LorenAmelang said in No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FloC’ed.:

I see:

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT  /t.js?q=floc&t=D&l=wt-wt&s=0&ct=US&ss_mkt=us&p_ent=&ex=-1&cdrexp=b&biaexp=b&msvrtexp=b:1 

I searched for "cake" on DuckDuckGo and got a similar error but with "cake" instead of "floc", so it seems like some standard DDG script thing based on your search phrase.

GET https://duckduckgo.com/t.js?q=cake&t=D&l=us-en&s=0&dl=en&ct=SE&ss_mkt=us&p_ent=&ex=-1&cdrexp=b&biaexp=b&msvrtexp=b net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT

Error with Permissions-Policy header: Unrecognized feature: 'interest-cohort'.

So the DDG page has the "Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()" header, and Vivaldi ignores it? I guess that's more private than returning '0'?

It seems like Vivaldi doesn't even recognise this header, and I guess that is because Vivaldi has disabled FLoC.

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()  www.floc.com.ico:1

That seems to say Vivaldi asked FLoC for something they don't have. But why is Vivaldi requesting it?

If I were to guess, you searched for "floc". DDG shows website favicons among the results so it tried to get the favicon for the website floc.com (one of the search results) but failed with a 404.

---

(Oh, and I'm not using Dark Reader, by the way)

[Pathduck]

@Komposten I guess the poor web admins at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee are going "what are all these requests coming in from search engines all of a sudden!??"

[Komposten]

@Pathduck Hahaha, I didn't even glance at the page so I completely missed that it wasn't FLoC-related.