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Announcing the PureBoot Bundle: Tamper-evident Firmware from the Factory – Purism
https://puri.sm/posts/announcing-the-pureboot-bundle-tamper-evident-firmware-from-the-factory/ #purism #librem13 #librem15 #privacy #security

California Has No Broadband Plan for the Future While The World Marches Ahead

The world’s largest economies are aggressively modernizing their Internet infrastructure with universal fiber to-the-home plans or have already achieved that metric—with the exception of the United States.  EFF noted that there is a desperate need for a federal “Fiber for All” plan that tackles this national problem. But the same can be said about the state of California, the country’s largest state economy, which ranks on its own as the fifth largest economy of the world. 

In fact, as of 2012, the California legislature decided to eliminate the authority of its own telecom regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) through the end of 2019—on the promise that such a move would produce an affordable, widely available, high-speed broadband networks.

That never happened.

Despite that fact, AT&T and Comcast lobbyists are close to convincing the state legislature to renew that law with Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez’s A.B. 1366. EFF remains strongly opposed to the legislation. We have detailed to the legislature the extent to which Californians face a monopoly for the future of broadband access per the government’s own data. If this legislature listens to AT&T and Comcast by backing this bill, it will risk dropping California further behind the rest of the world's major economic powers as they build affordable high-speed broadband.

Take Action

Don't Let the Legislature extend Broadband Monopolies

Most Californians Face Expensive Local Monopolies or No Access at All

Major ISPs argue that less regulatory oversight allows market forces to promote universally available, affordable, and competitive high capacity networks. But that hasn’t been proven true anywhere on planet Earth. When ISPs are left completely to their own devices, they tend to focus on the easiest-to-serve customers rather than try to reach everyone. That leaves most people with high-speed broadband as a monopoly—or no choice at all—per the government’s own data. California’s own broadband picture is abysmal.  Data shows a vast majority of Californians are facing a monopoly when it comes to high-speed broadband access ready for the future. This is because only small ISPs and local governments are building fiber to the home while the large statewide telecom companies like AT&T have opted to avoid competing with Comcast. That leaves Californians worse off than in 2012, the year the state deregulated broadband companies, when most people had at least two viable competitive choices.

And it is not like the big ISPs are hard up for capital to invest. They in fact received billions in new capital after federal tax cuts. Rather than systemically replacing their legacy networks with fiber, they ended up buying back stocks. And ISPs have, for years, prioritized mergers and acquisitions over investment in the future—leaving AT&T and Comcast the most indebted companies in the world. If we stick with the current approach to broadband access, there is no reason to expect that the current trajectory of the state’s market into local monopolies will change. 

What Are California’s International Competitors Doing on Broadband?

Other major global economies with the same goal of universal fiber access rely on an expert regulatory agency to study the barriers—and use its power to knock them down. California, has long denied itself the power to follow suit by enacting Public Utilities Code 710 in 2012 at the behest of the major ISPs. That’s left most California residents stuck with cable monopolies or old, degrading telephone infrastructure. When we compare California’s inaction to other major economic powers, the state’s telecom policy looks down right backwards.

Larger economies such as Japan replaced their entire telecom networks with fiber years ago, and sell symmetrical gigabit broadband services for around $50 a month. For comparison, Californians in monopoly markets, on average, pay between 200% to 300% that rate ($159.99 in San Jose, $159.95 in Antioch, or $100 in Los Angeles for example) for slower speeds, which also mirrors the national story. Furthermore, when a country has ubiquitous fiber, it can quickly upgrade to faster speeds on the cheap—and can be leveraged for speedy 5G highspeed wireless deployments. For example, South Korea took just two months to hit 1 million 5G users because the entire country is already wired with fiber optics. The UK, which has a smaller economy than California, recognized last year that their telecom networks were not where they should be and adopted the bold vision of connecting 15 million new homes to fiber by 2025. It aims to have universal coverage by 2033.

France, which was underperforming on fiber deployment when compared to its EU peers, empowered its regulator to leverage its authority to push the ISPs to commit to near universal transition to fiber optics and invested billions in public dollars in infrastructure. Now the major ISPs there have committed to a near-universal transition to fiber networks in just a few years. France’s largest ISP, Orange, is reaching for 92% fiber-to-the-home coverage by next year. Smaller economies such as Lithuania, Portugal, Latvia, and Spain already exceed 70 percent fiber to the home coverage (California is less than 20 percent—with most of the action around San Francisco). The consistent theme here is none of these countries reached these metrics without a plan executed by an expert agency empowered to address competition and universal access.

Stop A.B. 1366 and Demand That California Adopt an Ambitious Fiber Plan

There is no good reason why a vast majority of Californians can’t get access to fiber networks at an affordable price. It will take work and experts to study the market’s shortfalls and to remedy them. But California has a lot of case studies of successful approaches around the world—even from other states. In Utah, people have 11 choices for gigabit fiber services through an open access fiber network built by local governments. North Dakota has already reached 60 percent fiber-to-the-home due to aggressive local investments.

California has historically been a leader in broadband policy; it opened up the telecom market to local competition, eventually prompting the landscape-changing federal Telecommunications Act of 1996.  But it will not regain that position if we allow the California legislature to pass this AT&T- and Comcast-backed bill in the coming weeks. Contact your state Senator and ask them to vote No on A.B. 1366. Tell them Californians deserve not only the same broadband options and standards enjoyed by the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, but also for their state to be a global leader.

Tech Is No Panacea for the Classroom

The Wall Street Journal reports that parents are starting to have a few wee concerns about digital classrooms: When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping […]

“The answer is rather simple: Don’t. Control. People.” https://puri.sm/posts/control-freedom-and-harm/ Librem One doesn’t track, doesn’t retain useless data and uses free software while Big Tech strips freedom and causes harm https://librem.one #purism #libremone

Mouthwash use could inhibit benefits of exercise

Scientists have shown that the blood pressure-lowering effect of exercise is significantly reduced when people rinse their mouths with antibacterial mouthwash, rather than water - showing the importance of oral bacteria in cardiovascular health.

Sen. Joe Manchin Is Out, but an Actual Progressive Is Making a Serious Run for West Virginia Governor

Stephen Smith’s anti-establishment campaign for governor recently out-raised all of its Republican opponents — including the incumbent — combined.

The post Sen. Joe Manchin Is Out, but an Actual Progressive Is Making a Serious Run for West Virginia Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

Here’s How Much the Democratic Party Charges to Be on Each House Committee

Democrats are lagging in their dues payments to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to a party document obtained by The Intercept.

The post Here’s How Much the Democratic Party Charges to Be on Each House Committee appeared first on The Intercept.

Playing Around

What do the brilliant people we’ve elevated to make six figures to tell us what’s wrong with America on television say causes mass shootings?

Bret Stephens Meets His Match

Bret Stephens meets the enigmatic anti-hero with the proportionate powers of a bedbug!

Main Unattraction

A Don Jr. event was so poorly attended that organizers had to ask the audience to move closer to the stage.

Watch "iOS vs Android vs Librem 5 -- Which one leaks more data?" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/yHcHi0TBFv4 #privacy #security #librem5

How humans have shaped dogs' brains

Dog brain structure varies across breeds and is correlated with specific behaviors, according to new research published in JNeurosci. These findings show how, by selectively breeding for certain behaviors, humans have shaped the brains of their best friends.

Bacteria in pneumonia attack using bleaching agent

Research shows that bacteria use hydrogen peroxide to weaken the immune system and cause pneumonia. Hydrogen peroxide is also known as a bleaching agent that is used to whiten teeth or hair, as a stain remover, as well as for cleaning surfaces and disinfecting wounds.

We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job? | Sonia Sodha | Opinion | The Guardian https://prismo.xyz/posts/8562a0b7-c254-4798-a1e8-2ee1cf1b1a7b

Audio Karate streaming new song “Sin Chuchillo”

California punks Audio Karate are streaming the new track “Sin Chuchillo”. It happens to be the second offering off of the band’s long-awaited, much-anticipated, new release Malo. The new album will be the third release for the punk veterans, originally recorded back in 2007 but never released, the album will finally see the light of day […]

The post Audio Karate streaming new song “Sin Chuchillo” appeared first on Dying Scene.

Suggested move to plant-based diets risks worsening brain health nutrient deficiency

The momentum behind a move to plant-based and vegan diets for the good of the planet is commendable, but risks worsening an already low intake of an essential nutrient involved in brain health, warns a nutritionist.

Apple apologizes for listening in on Siri conversations https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/apple-no-more-siri-recordings-1.5263291 #privacy #security #libremone

DEA Agents Ambush Amtrak Passengers With Controversial Searches and Seizures

With the help of Amtrak and Greyhound informants, agents approach people on thin evidence they are drug couriers — and often take their cash.

The post DEA Agents Ambush Amtrak Passengers With Controversial Searches and Seizures appeared first on The Intercept.

New York Took On the Real Estate Industry and Won. Illinois Could Be Next.

On June 14, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law new housing legislation that guarantees the "strongest tenant protections in history," extending rent regulation from New York City and adjacent counties to the entire state, finally closing rent control loopholes and eliminating the “vacancy bonus” that allowed landlords to hike rents once tenants moved out.

Some form of rent regulation has been in place in New York City for nearly a century. But the laws that were meant to keep housing affordable and tenants in place by limiting rent increases had been run through with loopholes because they had to be re-legislated—usually with considerable changes pushed by the real estate industry—every four years. The new laws are permanent, ending this periodic “housing marathon.”

The sweeping victory in a state that’s home to some of the biggest real estate interests in the world offers important lessons, such as how to connect urban and rural communities in the demand for housing justice. In Illinois, where a bill for statewide rent control is now being debated, organizers can learn from the strategies employed by organizers in New York, ranging from building strong coalitions to pressuring lawmakers and running insurgent electoral campaigns.

The fight for new rent regulations in New York didn’t begin in 2019. For housing rights organizers, one of the catalyzing moments came when Diana Richardson won her seat in the New York Assembly in 2015 without taking any money from real-estate interests. When the new rent laws were signed this year, organizers could also think back to the 2018 rent strike in a mobile home park near Buffalo, and when, later in 2018, insurgent candidates beat the six Democratic state Senators who for years had ceded power to Senate Republicans. And then there was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign against subsidies for a proposed new Amazon headquarters in Queens.

Cea Weaver, the Campaign Manager for a coalition called the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance, says that years of advocacy and protest added urgency to the insurgent electoral victories. “We didn’t just win the races, we tapped into a mandate.” As the deadline to renew the rent laws loomed, Weaver said, legislators thought, “If I don’t deliver on rent, this tenant coalition could vote me out of office.” When Amazon initially chose Queens for its headquarters, organizers saw another one of Cuomo’s backroom deals exacerbating the housing crisis and used it to link landlords and real estate money to corruption in Albany. From Amazon to evictions, Weaver explained, the perceptions of landlords and their connections to Cuomo soured, and the stage for the new rent laws was set.

But there was an even stronger wind in the tenants’ sails. New Yorkers increasingly recognized the importance of housing affordability as an issue, and rent regulation as a remedy. This was due in part to the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance’s daily efforts to, as Weaver put it, build a campaign that had relevance “from Brooklyn to Buffalo.” Who, after all, doesn’t have a mental image of a cramped, unaffordable apartment in New York? And who wouldn’t want to escape it by finding a regulated unit?

The organizers had a plan in case this fact of life in New York was lost on anyone: Kevin Borden, the Co-Director of Manufactured Housing Action, said that the movement is stronger when organizers step aside and let others do the talking. “No one can take away the tenants’ stories,” he said.  

When Juanita Amador, a tenant turned organizer with the Kingston Tenants Union got on a church stage about 90 miles north of Times Square last January to share her story with a room full of locals, she didn’t have to strain in order to connect with her audience. She only had to tell the all-too-familiar facts.

Amador said that she grew up in the 1970s in Alphabet City and that her landlord set fire to her building when her father refused to leave. Her father rescued her from the fire by throwing a blanket over a hole in the floor. After the fire, after being homeless, after being evicted, after moving to Kingston, Amador felt much like others in the room who have seen prices rise as renters fleeing Brooklyn put pressure on upstate New York: “I’m tired, and I guess I got a little radical.”

Lifting the ban

While Amador and others were setting the groundwork for the new rent laws, the stars were aligning in Illinois. In 2017, State Rep. Will Guzzardi introduced a bill that would repeal the 1997 legislative ban on rent regulation. The Illinois ban, along with a number of similar bans across the country, is the legacy of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Since its founding in 1973, ALEC has rolled back consumer protection regulations on a national scale.

In the spring of 2018, State Sen. Mattie Hunter introduced an even more aggressive bill that would not only repeal the Illinois ban but also establish regional boards responsible for regulating future rent increases. In November 2018, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who supported rent control on the campaign trail, won the governorship. The future looked bright. 

But as spring turned to summer and tenants in New York won radical reforms, organizers in Illinois watched their rent laws languish in legislative committees. What happened?

Money from the real estate lobby is a major challenge to tenants in Illinois. It’s one of the reasons why Illinois passed the ban on rent regulation in the first place, which gave today’s group of rent control advocates their name—the Lift the Ban Coalition. Similar to the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance, the Lift the Ban Coalition wants statewide change. Unlike its New York counterpart, the Coalition doesn’t have significant membership outside Chicago, its respective metropolis. It is also smaller in scale—the Lift the Ban Coalition is comprised of about 20 organizations, where the Alliance brought together over 66 groups for its “Housing Justice for All” campaign. But the largest developers in the country couldn’t stop what happened in Albany, so beyond these differences, there must be something else at work in Illinois.

In the spring of 2019, when Curtis Tarver, a state representative from Chicago who campaigned in support of rent control, decided to vote against it, other representatives decided not to stick their necks out either. Gov. Pritzker hasn’t mentioned repealing the ban on rent control since taking office, despite using his Democratic majorities to overhaul the tax system and legalize marijuana. Michael Madigan, the Speaker of the House and the longest-serving leader of any legislative body in the history of the United States, hasn’t said much either.

Such a muzzling of debate over rent control would never have happened in New York, where the periodic expiration of the rent laws forces legislators to acknowledge the several million people living in regulated apartments, even if the laws ultimately contained concessions to landlords. With no regulation on the books in Illinois and not a single constituent in a regulated unit, it has become easier for skeptics to respond to calls for regulation with clichéd counter-proposals for economic development policies or plans to build more housing, and Chicago’s ample supply of vacant land makes these arguments appealing. “We’re not landlocked,” said Brian Bernardoni, the Senior Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy for the Chicago Association of Realtors, who thinks that cutting regulations will encourage the construction of affordable housing on empty lots.

In New York, the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance had a deep reservoir of regulated tenants that, once mobilized, scared legislators into action. Without a single regulated unit in Illinois, the Lift the Ban Coalition is trying to create that from scratch. So, in 2018 and 2019, organizers got out the vote for three non-binding referenda in parts of Chicago, which showed overwhelming support for rent control. But many legislators still say that they won’t move on rent control until they hear from their constituents.  

The Lift the Ban Coalition has begun making robocalls and canvassing beyond its Chicago neighborhood bases. Organizers and Coalition members like Simone Alexander say they want Chicago tenants, as well as those in suburban districts that flipped Democratic in the last election, to call their elected representatives. But when an Illinois resident gets a robocall about rent control, what might they think?

Last year, as part of the effort to expand beyond Chicago, Lift the Ban Coalition members met with renters in Carbondale, Illinois—a town so far south of Chicago that if you went the same distance east, you’d be halfway to Manhattan. Jennifer Fertaly, director of Carbondale’s Center for Empowerment and Justice, recalled that the same residents who couldn’t afford their rent asked, “why do we care about rent control? That’s a city thing.”

About 40 percent of Americans struggle to afford their homes, but a shared problem doesn’t necessarily create agreement on the solution. Residents across New York have an idea of what unaffordability in the state looks like, and understand that rent regulation has been part of the policy toolbox for decades. But is there a similar, broadly-understood premise—let alone solution—for Illinoisans to organize around?

Illinois is not lacking for Amazon-scale debacles that could boost rent control’s appeal. The former Cook County Assessor, Joseph Berrios, systematically shifted the tax burden onto those least able to pay by overvaluing properties in poorer neighborhoods. The skewed valuations drummed up a steady stream of property tax appeals for tax lawyers like Ed Burke, a Chicago alderman who was recently indicted, along with his assistant and retired Park District plumber Peter J. Andrews, for allegedly shaking down businesses and using the City of Chicago as a criminal “enterprise.” The connections between corruption and affordability in Illinois ring similar to those between Amazon, real estate operators, and Cuomo in New York, but have yet to surface as a key element of that state’s rent control debate.

“We are next”

Jawanza Malone, Director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization and leader of the Lift the Ban Coalition, is fundraising to hire a full-time Campaign Coordinator—something that Kevin Borden of Manufactured Housing Action, said in an interview was important for the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance, along with money for travel, a press consultant and a leadership retreat. Organizers are also thinking about how best to tell a story that will capture Illinoisans’ imaginations. The Coalition has already publicized data on the toll that unaffordability is taking on renters in Chicago, and Malone has appeared in the media, once face to face with Brian Bernardoni of the Chicago Association of Realtors.

After talking with organizers from the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance in late July, the Lift the Ban Coalition is thinking through how to apply New York’s lessons to Illinois. “We had been hesitant that gentrifying neighborhoods like Pilsen might be different from places like Rockford,” says Diego Morales, a member of the Lift the Ban Coalition’s Steering Committee. But the New York experience showed that urban-rural alliances are strongest when organizers focus on how housing impacts everyone, regardless of locale. Then there’s the electoral power that tenants built in New York to kick legislators out of office. Morales wants to hold Illinois representatives like Curtis Tarver, the one who campaigned on rent control and then voted against it once in office, similarly accountable.

Finally, there’s the question of how so many organizations that want the same thing can work together despite their many differences—chief among them the proclivity towards either activist insurgency or incrementalism. In the first camp stand groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America and the Autonomous Tenants Union, which push for radical change to the housing system. In the latter stand progressive foundations that put more trust in the promise of electoral politics and rely on liberal donors to keep the lights on.

The challenge in Illinois is a daunting one: sweeping an old law clear off the books, rather than reforming certain aspects of existing laws, as was the case in New York. Do you promote progressive candidates or lobby those already in the state legislature? Do you push the Democratic governor or try to rally a progressive base? Do you get into wonky debates over policy, or trumpet sweeping change?

Looking at New York, Morales says it’s clearly an “all of the above approach.” If Illinois follows through, he says, “we are next.”

Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox

Last week, Google announced a plan to “build a more private web.” The announcement post was, frankly, a mess. The company that tracks user behavior on over ⅔ of the web said that “Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do.” 

Google not only doubled down on its commitment to targeted advertising, but also made the laughable claim that blocking third-party cookies -- by far the most common tracking technology on the Web, and Google’s tracking method of choice -- will hurt user privacy. By taking away the tools that make tracking easy, it contended, developers like Apple and Mozilla will force trackers to resort to “opaque techniques” like fingerprinting. Of course, lost in that argument is the fact that the makers of Safari and Firefox have shown serious commitments to shutting down fingerprinting, and both browsers have made real progress in that direction. Furthermore, a key part of the Privacy Sandbox proposals is Chrome’s own (belated) plan to stop fingerprinting.

But hidden behind the false equivalencies and privacy gaslighting are a set of real technical proposals. Some are genuinely good ideas. Others could be unmitigated privacy disasters. This post will look at the specific proposals under Google’s new “Privacy Sandbox” umbrella and talk about what they would mean for the future of the web.

The good: fewer CAPTCHAs, fighting fingerprints

Let’s start with the proposals that might actually help users.

First up is the “Trust API.” This proposal is based on Privacy Pass, a privacy-preserving and frustration-reducing alternative to CAPTCHAs. Instead of having to fill out CAPTCHAs all over the web, with the Trust API, users will be able to fill out a CAPTCHA once and then use “trust tokens” to prove that they are human in the future. The tokens are anonymous and not linkable to one another, so they won’t help Google (or anyone else) track users. Since Google is the single largest CAPTCHA provider in the world, its adoption of the Trust API could be a big win for users with disabilities, users of Tor, and anyone else who hates clicking on grainy pictures of storefronts.

Google’s proposed “privacy budget” for fingerprinting is also exciting. Browser fingerprinting is the practice of gathering enough information about a specific browser instance to try to uniquely identify a user. Usually, this is accomplished by combining easily accessible information like the user agent string with data from powerful APIs like the HTML canvas. Since fingerprinting extracts identifying data from otherwise-useful APIs, it can be hard to stop without hamstringing legitimate web apps. As a workaround, Google proposes limiting the amount of data that websites can access through potentially sensitive APIs. Each website will have a “budget,” and if it goes over budget, the browser will cut off its access. Most websites won’t have any use for things like the HTML canvas, so they should be unaffected. Sites that need access to powerful APIs, like video chat services and online games, will be able to ask the user for permission to go “over budget.” The devil will be in the details, but the privacy budget is a promising framework for combating browser fingerprinting.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good stuff ends. The rest of Google’s proposals range from mediocre to downright dangerous.

The bad: Conversion measurement

Perhaps the most fleshed-out proposal in the Sandbox is the conversion measurement API. This is trying to tackle a problem as old as online ads: how can you know whether the people clicking on an ad ultimately buy the product it advertised? Currently, third-party cookies do most of the heavy lifting. A third-party advertiser serves an ad on behalf of a marketer and sets a cookie. On its own site, the marketer includes a snippet of code which causes the user’s browser to send the cookie set earlier back to the advertiser. The advertiser knows when the user sees an ad, and it knows when the same user later visits the marketer’s site and makes a purchase. In this way, advertisers can attribute ad impressions to page views and purchases that occur days or weeks later.

Without third-party cookies, that attribution gets a little more complicated. Even if an advertiser can observe traffic around the web, without a way to link ad impressions to page views, it won’t know how effective its campaigns are. After Apple started cracking down on advertisers’ use of cookies with Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), it also proposed a privacy-preserving ad attribution solution. Now, Google is proposing something similar. Basically, advertisers will be able to mark up their ads with metadata, including a destination URL, a reporting URL, and a field for extra “impression data” -- likely a unique ID. Whenever a user sees an ad, the browser will store its metadata in a global ad table. Then, if the user visits the destination URL in the future, the browser will fire off a request to the reporting URL to report that the ad was “converted.”

In theory, this might not be so bad. The API should allow an advertiser to learn that someone saw its ad and then eventually landed on the page it was advertising; this can give raw numbers about the campaign’s effectiveness without individually-identifying information. 

The problem is the impression data. Apple’s proposal allows marketers to store just 6 bits of information in a “campaign ID,” that is, a number between 1 and 64. This is enough to differentiate between ads for different products, or between campaigns using different media.

On the other hand, Google’s ID field can contain 64 bits of information -- a number between 1 and 18 quintillion. This will allow advertisers to attach a unique ID to each and every ad impression they serve, and, potentially, to connect ad conversions with individual users. If a user interacts with multiple ads from the same advertiser around the web, these IDs can help the advertiser build a profile of the user’s browsing habits. 

The ugly: FLoC

Even worse is Google’s proposal for Federated Learning of Cohorts (or “FLoC”). Behind the scenes, FLoC is based on Google’s pretty neat federated learning technology. Basically, federated learning allows users to build their own, local machine learning models by sharing little bits of information at a time. This allows users to reap the benefits of machine learning without sharing all of their data at once. Federated learning systems can be configured to use secure multi-party computation and differential privacy in order to keep raw data verifiably private.

The problem with FLoC isn’t the process, it’s the product. FLoC would use Chrome users’ browsing history to do clustering. At a high level, it will study browsing patterns and generate groups of similar users, then assign each user to a group (called a “flock”). At the end of the process, each browser will receive a “flock name” which identifies it as a certain kind of web user. In Google’s proposal, users would then share their flock name, as an HTTP header, with everyone they interact with on the web.

This is, in a word, bad for privacy. A flock name would essentially be a behavioral credit score: a tattoo on your digital forehead that gives a succinct summary of who you are, what you like, where you go, what you buy, and with whom you associate. The flock names will likely be inscrutable to users, but could reveal incredibly sensitive information to third parties. Trackers will be able to use that information however they want, including to augment their own behind-the-scenes profiles of users. 

Google says that the browser can choose to leave “sensitive” data from browsing history out of the learning process. But, as the company itself acknowledges, different data is sensitive to different people; a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy will leave many users at risk. Additionally, many sites currently choose to respect their users’ privacy by refraining from working with third-party trackers. FLoC would rob these websites of such a choice.

Furthermore, flock names will be more meaningful to those who are already capable of observing activity around the web. Companies with access to large tracking networks will be able to draw their own conclusions about the ways that users from a certain flock tend to behave. Discriminatory advertisers will be able to identify and filter out flocks which represent vulnerable populations. Predatory lenders will learn which flocks are most prone to financial hardship. 

FLoC is the opposite of privacy-preserving technology. Today, trackers follow you around the web, skulking in the digital shadows in order to guess at what kind of person you might be. In Google’s future, they will sit back, relax, and let your browser do the work for them.

The “ugh”: PIGIN

That brings us to PIGIN. While FLoC promises to match each user with a single, opaque group identifier, PIGIN would have each browser track a set of “interest groups” that it believes its user belongs to. Then, whenever the browser makes a request to an advertiser, it can send along a list of the user’s “interests” to enable better targeting.

Google’s proposal devotes a lot of space to discussing the privacy risks of PIGIN. However, the protections it discusses fall woefully short. The authors propose using cryptography to ensure that there are at least 1,000 people in an interest group before disclosing a user’s membership in it, as well as limiting the maximum number of interests disclosed at a time to 5. This limitation doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny: membership in 5 distinct groups, each of which contains just a few thousand people, will be more than enough to uniquely identify a huge portion of users on the web. Furthermore, malicious actors will be able to game the system in a number of ways, including to learn about users’ membership in sensitive categories. While the proposal gives a passing mention to using differential privacy, it doesn’t begin to describe how, specifically, that might alleviate the myriad privacy risks PIGIN raises.

Google touts PIGIN as a win for transparency and user control. This may be true to a limited extent. It would be nice to know what information advertisers use to target particular ads, and it would be useful to be able to opt-out of specific “interest groups” one by one. But like FLoC, PIGIN does nothing to address the bad ways that online tracking currently works. Instead, it would provide trackers with a massive new stream of information they could use to build or augment their own user profiles. The ability to remove specific interests from your browser might be nice, but it won’t do anything to prevent every company that’s already collected it from storing, sharing, or selling that data. Furthermore, these features of PIGIN would likely become another “option” that most users don’t touch. Defaults matter. While Apple and Mozilla work to make their browsers private out of the box, Google continues to invent new privacy-invasive practices for users to opt-out of.

It’s never about privacy

If the Privacy Sandbox won’t actually help users, why is Google proposing all these changes?

Google can probably see which way the wind is blowing. Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection have severely curtailed third-party trackers’ access to data. Meanwhile, users and lawmakers continue to demand stronger privacy protections from Big Tech. While Chrome still dominates the browser market, Google might suspect that the days of unlimited access to third-party cookies are numbered. 

As a result, Google has apparently decided to defend its business model on two fronts. First, it’s continuing to argue that third-party cookies are actually fine, and companies like Apple and Mozilla who would restrict trackers’ access to user data will end up harming user privacy. This argument is absurd. But unfortunately, as long as Chrome remains the most popular browser in the world, Google will be able to single-handedly dictate whether cookies remain a viable option for tracking most users.

At the same time, Google seems to be hedging its bets. The “Privacy Sandbox” proposals for conversion measurement, FLoC, and PIGIN are each aimed at replacing one of the existing ways that third-party cookies are used for targeted ads. Google is brainstorming ways to continue serving targeted ads in a post-third-party-cookie world. If cookies go the way of the pop-up ad, Google’s targeting business will continue as usual.

The Sandbox isn’t about your privacy. It’s about Google’s bottom line. At the end of the day, Google is an advertising company that happens to make a browser.