Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics [LWN.net]

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 26, 2022 22:05 UTC (Wed) by james (guest, #1325)
Parent article: Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

The Topics "are thoughtfully curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race".

And with an eye to the GDPRs' "special categories" of sensitive data, which require "explicit consent to the processing of those personal data".

This was always a problem for FLoC, since membership of a cohort can easily reveal political opinions (for example, which news sources a user accesses). If membership of a cohort could be combined with other data to identify an individual, it is illegal to process that data (i.e. that the user is a member of that cohort) until the user gives explicit consent to it, which is a bit of a problem when this is all supposed to be automatic.

One might conclude that if it took this long for Google to identify this problem, they are not seriously looking for a replacement: they just feel it necessary to be Doing Something before someone decides to actually enforce GDPR on the advertising industry.

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Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 26, 2022 22:29 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (9 responses)

So what do you think the probability that someone interested in "Face & Body Care/Make-Up & Cosmetics" is a woman? I'd say at least 80%. And how about the probability that someone interested in "Off-Road Vehicles" is a man? I'd say at least 55-60%.

Add in enough categories and I bet Google could figure out gender, at any rate, with a confidence of 95%.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 27, 2022 0:51 UTC (Thu) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link]

I fully expect these categories to shift and change and fragment further into sub categories. This is by no means the final list. I would even expect a framework for sites and advertizers to make custom extensions to the categories. Even in real-time response to events and trends.

The timing on that sort of thing with real-world events could be quite telling as to where a person lives or on what side of an issue they fall.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 27, 2022 12:57 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (7 responses)

> Add in enough categories and I bet Google could figure out gender, at any rate, with a confidence of 95%.

Which is probably why they only send 3. And there's a pretty good chance one of those three is a randomly chosen topic.

If Google wants to know your gender they can just examine your Facebook page. If you don't have a Facebook page you're not an interesting part of the market anyway.

Seriously though, if you told people that there was a panel where you could choose to see more ads for expensive electronics and fast cars instead of for diapers, I'm sure there's a significant group that would consider that a good thing.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 27, 2022 14:30 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (2 responses)

> Seriously though, if you told people that there was a panel where you could choose to see more ads for expensive electronics and fast cars instead of for diapers, I'm sure there's a significant group that would consider that a good thing.

I think the basic tradeoff is more like: you regularly visit a web site that needs to make $0.10 in revenue from you (to pay for operating costs plus profit), so they will choose to show however many ads for expensive electronics and fast cars are necessary before you'll spend an average of $1 on those products, or they'll show however many ads for diapers so you spend $1.

If you never buy diapers (but they don't know that), they'll have to show you an infinite number of diaper ads, probably with lots of provocative images and auto-playing videos to try really really hard to convince you to buy diapers which you don't need, and that still won't be enough. Whereas if they know your interests enough to show a single ad for something that is genuinely relevant and useful for you, you're reasonably likely to give them the revenue they need, and their site can be financially viable without an obnoxious quantity of ads. It doesn't seem surprising that many people would prefer the latter.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 27, 2022 16:33 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

They might start to put static html pages without 50MiB of js if they want to save money and have less ad revenue though.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 31, 2022 17:24 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link]

The problem with this reasoning is that the number of ads shown is not determined by a target amount of money made. Instead, the number of ads is increased until they become obnoxious enough that users stop visiting the site and ad income begins to drop. Whether the obnoxiousness comes from the number of ads or their irrelevancy does not matter.

Also, there are people (me included) who actually prefer to see irrelevant ads, because they are easier to mentally ignore and less able to manipulate you.

Correlation

Posted Jan 27, 2022 18:37 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

In my circle of friends it is usual to manipulate Facebook's algorithm so that the constant advertisements are for stuff you don't mind in your field of view. For a large majority of those friends it turns out that "goth girls in lingerie" is both an advertising topic Facebook can be persuaded to show you and acceptable visual noise. Even for those friends who would plausibly identify themselves as "goth girls" I don't think lingerie is something they're likely to buy based on a Facebook recommendation, but it's an acceptable source of visual noise.

Right now though my Facebook adverts are 100% wall-to-wall adverts for an "innovation centre" which I think was built in my city in late 2019 and presumably is now realising that nobody wants to rent their office space and they never will again, oops. Facebook doesn't necessarily know I live here, but it does know I studied here, since that's why I have a Facebook account.

I didn't explicitly tell Facebook my gender, but interestingly Google correctly guessed my gender and *despite that* it spent months advertising women's shoes to me after I bought one pair because they are pretty (they're seriously very pretty, they're on a shelf in my living room). Not just women's shoes, but specifically exactly that same pair of shoes. Again, they're very pretty but nobody is going to buy two pairs. Advertising is algorithm driven and algorithms are dumb.

I think the evidence suggests that actually all the fuss over tracking based Internet advertising was a waste of time and money. $1000 spent on tracked Internet advertising won't actually be more effective than $1000 spent on, say, a billboard or a magazine advert, but tracking means you will get more advertising executives trying to *persuade* you that it worked because they have more tools to lie with. In particular, while the sales guy telling you that definitely somebody saw the billboard and then bought a brand new car is easy to dismiss, the guy saying the same thing about your Facebook advert has a chart that says so, how can it be wrong? Well, the same as the first guy, it's lying. That guy was on his way to buy the car when he passed the billboard, and he was reading Facebook right before buying a car too, it's not causality it's coincidence, and they've got more powerful tools to harvest coincidence online.

Why did I see all those shoe adverts? Because it's correlated. This guy saw your shoe advert AND he bought shoes. What do you mean which happened first?

Correlation

Posted Jan 27, 2022 22:55 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem with ads continuing to chase you after you've already bought the product is notorious. My suspicion is that this is an especially bad problem when your decision to buy the product isn't affected by the ad at all; you just decided to buy it by browsing on their web site. The ad broker is tracking your surfing habits and knows you've been looking at a product. If you had decided to look at the product based on an ad, they'd know because they track clicks. They would probably know when you bought it, because they really want to be able to prove that their ads lead to sales.

But if you don't follow the ad to the product, the broker will only know that you've looked at the product; they won't know that you've bought it. Worse, the brokers keep exactly who they show which ad secret from the advertisers because knowing who to target is the core of their business. The last thing they want to do is to tell advertisers who is being shown which ads. So they keep showing you the ad in hopes you'll buy, all the while keeping it secret from the advertiser, who could tell them it's pointless because they've already made the sale.

Correlation

Posted Jan 28, 2022 9:29 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (1 responses)

> They would probably know when you bought it, because they really want to be able to prove that their ads lead to sales.

Perhaps that piece of information is missing? Instead the algorithm assumed you didn't buy but were strongly interested in buying since the sale hasn't been reported back to the advertiser.

Correlation

Posted Jan 31, 2022 6:36 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Perhaps that piece of information is missing?

Yes, that's the idea. The point I was trying to convey is that the information isn't missing randomly. It's missing because of the way online ads work, which means it can't easily be fixed without deep changes to the system.

Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Posted Jan 27, 2022 8:33 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> The Topics "are thoughtfully curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race".

> It may make sense for sites to provide their own topics (e.g., via meta tags, headers, or JavaScript)

Ah ah ah. We’re not evil web sites are. We don’t abuse privacy and cookie laws web sites choose to implement them in the most uneffective way they can think of.

Are those people real?