Publishers point of view

[rafalrybnik]

Most issues deal with possible leaks of users' browsing history from the user’s perspective.
I would like to draw attention to a similar problem, but from the perspective of those who maintain websites - the publishers.

Cohorts are calculated based on whether the user has been to various sites. For example, there is a publisher A who publishes a site dedicated to a niche topic such as teapots. Preparing the content and maintaining the servers are business costs that are covered by advertising revenue, i.e. the ability to reach users interested in teapots.
Since even superfans of teapots do not read sites about them very often, the number of visits may not be sufficient to display the advertisements of all interested advertisers.
Therefore, through various mechanisms, attempts are made to reach teapot fans on publisher B's mainstream sites, which are visited by the majority of the population.

In a world with third-party cookies, if publisher B wants to target the users of publisher A, the publishers must somehow come to a business agreement and implement tracking codes on A's websites.

If the current version of FLoC goes live, it will be possible to target ads to cohorts of users. If it is possible to learn about a cohort that includes visitors of publisher A (e.g. by methods described in other issues), that publisher may lose its market position to publisher B, which has a larger base. This may ultimately result in publisher A becoming unprofitable and the site being closed down.

In colloquial terms, some publishers wonder why they should bear the cost of producing content that will appeal to specific audiences when the fruits of that labour will be distributed to everyone else. This will result in an even greater flow of advertising budgets to big players like Facebook and Google, who will be able to catch literally every possible cohort.

[michaelkleber]

Hi @fischerbach,

There has been some good discussion of these questions in the Web Advertising Business Group, particularly from @dmarti and @AramZS. This led, for example, to the permissions model in the FLEDGE proposal, which puts audience building under the site owner's control.

For FLoC we will certainly allow control by the site owner, as in the section on Opting Out of Computation. This definitely offers publisher A some protection that they can't get in today's world of third-party cookies.

Is there some further control or modification that you're thinking would help here?

[dmarti]

A related issue is #27. I agree with @michaelkleber that it is important for any interest group or cohort to be trained only on activity where there is both an opt in from the site and consent from the user, so I have sent a small pull request to address some of these concerns in FLoC: #42 .

Besides the commercial audience data leakage issue that @fischerbach covers here, there are some other concerns.

• sites that serve people who share a protected class or sensitive characteristic would likely not want to train the browser to recognize their audiences off-site

• sites that use cohort membership to match ads to users would not want the legal risk of discriminating against a protected group in placement of an employment or housing ad.

[MarkMcEachran]

This problem, and I think many others, goes away if FLoC is activated on a publisher opt-in basis, rather than an opt-out. This would leave publishers who are oblivious to FLoC (probably the majority of site owners on the internet) in a protected state while allowing those who wish to participate an ability to do so.