Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Posted Jun 16, 2021 9:22 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)In reply to: Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog) by mathstuf
Parent article: Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
In which case, we're already moving on from "targeted ads are always a privacy problem" to "some forms of targeting are a privacy problem".
Posted Jun 16, 2021 11:09 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 16, 2021 16:44 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
One challenge here is that there are about 3 (Google, Amazon, Facebook, can't think of any others) companies that have sufficient data on viewers as it is that they can do deeply personalised context-aware ads without taking part in the data markets. If we're not careful, we end up in a situation where the big established players can get far better results per $ than any other ad placement firm. I am not convinced that this is a net improvement.
Posted Jun 16, 2021 23:06 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 17, 2021 9:40 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
Personally, I think that a better starting point is to take some points from the EU's GDPR, and add in extras to make advertising companies squirm.
From the GDPR, I'd take:
I would then add the following:
The combination means that someone who's privacy conscious can put quite a lot of load on an advertising data collector by themselves - they're stopping you using their data, but they're demanding full details of what you learn about them. You're forced into radical transparency: I know not just what you collected about me, but also where you collected it from, and it's up to everyone in the chain to maintain provenance. Further, because of the joint and several liability rule, you're in bother if anyone in the handling chain didn't bother with provenance.
Finally, it's near-terminal to the data marketplaces, because of the liability rule; sharing data with another company means that you are now liable for their process failures around data, not just your own, and you can't shield yourself by creating a small disposable company to do the sharing. Thus, if I buy your data from Google, then breach the rules, you can get Google to pay you a %age of their annual turnover. That's a big payday for you, even if I'm small fry and couldn't even pay the minimum fine.
Posted Jun 17, 2021 19:32 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
But the distinction is clear. Ads targetting A PERSON are clearly a privacy problem - they involve processing PII.
Ads targetting a website, and its typical audience, have no PII involvement and as such can't be a privacy problem.
So the distinction is basically based on "what is the target?" - a webite or a person.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 17, 2021 19:54 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
But all ads target people, not websites. The target for advertisers on LWN is not LWN, but the advertiser's expectation of the group of people who read LWN; that may well include PII as part of making sure that certain people are in that group.
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)
Wol
Privacy analysis of FLoC (Mozilla blog)