“attempting to explain to the public what they are doing”
The idea that you can explain FLoC, third party cookies or any other digital advertising technology to the public is crazy talk.
Ad tech is extremely complex and constantly evolving - “the public” includes children, the intellectually disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly and the illiterate.
No amount of documentation is going to help these people reach a point where they could actually be considered as giving “informed consent” to their “use” of an ad-tech stack that often involves dozens of different legal entities and software components.
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“why it is not a threat to privacy”
The entire purpose of FLoC is to maximise profit for Google by minimising my privacy.
I guess that automatically disqualifies it then. A 39 year old economic anthropologist couldn’t possibly know anything that I don’t already know. It’s crazy to take different points of view into consideration when forming an opinion!
A fair argument but I don’t think it’s really fair to compare Signal to Apple Maps because IMHO while there is a possibility that the NSA is able to somehow intercept my Signal messages on-device prior to encryption occurring; it is almost a certainty that the NSA has some form of back door access to Apple’s infrastructure and is able to access location/search data from Apple Maps.
This isn’t even really a criticism of Apple, it’s just the reality of the world that we have created since 9/11. I don’t believe any company that operates at Apple’s scale can keep its infrastructure totally private and secure from abuses of user privacy by the state. Especially if that company has infrastructure or employees in countries like the US/UK/China that are notorious for having extrajudicial/illegal/secret/unaccountable surveillance programs.
Totally agree with you on Google, they are the worst by far on user privacy. And we shouldn’t really expect anything different from a company that derives almost its entire revenue from advertising/data AND has been deeply connected to the intelligence agencies from Day 1.
Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012.
I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean that the NSA isn’t sucking up all your data from Apple Maps.
Claiming that Apple isn’t “telling Big Brother about me” is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of having their location data harvested by the US war machine.
Please use caution when relying on this website as an unbiased source of information.
The ABC is Australia’s state media outlet. They rely almost entirely on our (conservative) government for funding.
While they do some good investigative reporting on domestic issues, their coverage of anything involving China is insanely hawkish and they rely heavily on untrustworthy sources including lobbyists for the military industrial complex.
I know for a fact this happens. Gambling companies often buy marketing data from porn websites and MLM schemes in order to better target people with “impulse control issues”.
Former gambling addict and current mental health advocate here. For anyone with an addiction or a serious mental health problem, targeted advertising can be very dangerous.
Think about the “filter bubble” effect that we experience on platforms like YouTube where we are always being “recommended” content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.
Targeted advertising is no different except that it follows you across multiple devices and multiple online platforms in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder.
This might be fine if you are a capable, healthy and intelligent individual seeing ads for computer parts or shoes. What about the recovering alcoholic who is being “targeted” by alcohol advertising? Or the homeless schizophrenic girl I worked with a while ago who couldn’t escape a constant barrage of ads for highly addictive online gambling products?
Our brains are all wired differently and not everyone has the same level of “free will” as you do. The entire purpose of the advertising industry is to push you away from reasoned decision making and towards compulsive consumption.
As adtech becomes better at exploiting our psychological weaknesses and influencing human behaviour, I worry that we will not only see an increase in negative outcomes for the most vulnerable among us - but also an increase in mental illness among the general population as our borderline, compulsive and narcissistic traits are enabled and encouraged by soulless algorithms.