 Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open-source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. A couple of weeks ago, Google announced it was beginning to test a new ad technology inside Google Chrome called the Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC. It uses an algorithm to look at your browser history and place you in a group of people with similar browsing histories so that advertisers can target you. It’s more private than cookies, but it’s also complicated and has some potential privacy implications of its own if it’s not implemented right. Google Chrome is built on an open-source project, and so FLoC was implemented as part of that project that other browsers could include. I am not aware of any Chromium-based browser outside of Google’s own that will implement it and very aware of many that will refuse. One note I’ll drop here is that I am relieved that nobody else is implementing FLoC right away, because the way FLoC is constructed puts a very big responsibility on a browser maker. If implemented badly, FLoC could leak out sensitive information. It’s a complicated technology that does appear to keep you semi-anonymous, but there are enough details to hide dozens of devils. Anyway, here’s Brave: “The worst aspect of FLoC is that it materially harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.” And here’s Vivaldi: “We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented. It does not protect the privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google.” As you probably know, Opera has a long history of introducing privacy features that benefit our users: it was the first major browser to introduce built-in ad blocking, browser VPN and other privacy-centric features. The significance now is the end of third-party cookies, which will reduce the amount of cross-website tracking on the web. While we and other browsers are discussing new and better privacy-preserving advertising alternatives to cookies including FloC, we have no current plans to enable features like this in the Opera browsers in their current form. Generally speaking, we do, however, think it’s too early to say in which direction the market will move or what the major browsers will do. DuckDuckGo isn’t thought of as a browser, but it does make browsers for iOS and Android. On desktop, it’s already made a browser extension for other browsers to block it. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is very much against FLoC, has even made a website to let you know if you’re one of the few Chrome users who have been included in Google’s early tests. But maybe the most important Chromium-based browser not made by Google is Microsoft Edge. It is a big test for Google’s proposed FLoC technology: if Microsoft isn’t going to support it, that would pretty much mean Chrome really will be going it alone with this technology. As for Apple’s Safari, I will admit I didn’t reach out for comment because at this point it’s not difficult to guess what the answer will be. Apple, after all, deserves some credit for changing everybody’s default views on privacy. However, the story here is actually much more interesting than you might guess at first. John Wilander is a WebKit engineer at Apple who works on Safari’s privacy-enhancing Intelligent Tracking Prevention features. Wilander’s reply jibes with Microsoft’s statement that “the industry is on a journey” when it comes to balancing new advertising technologies and privacy. But it speaks to something really important: web standards people take their jobs seriously and are seriously committed to the web standards process that creates the open web. Read this posting in its entirety on OUR FORUM.
 Over the last few years, researchers have found a shocking number of vulnerabilities in seemingly basic code that underpins how devices communicate with the Internet. Now, a new set of nine such vulnerabilities are exposing an estimated 100 million devices worldwide, including an array of Internet-of-things products and IT management servers. The larger question researchers are scrambling to answer, though, is how to spur substantive changes—and implement effective defenses—as more and more of these types of vulnerabilities pile up. Dubbed Name:Wreck, the newly disclosed flaws are in four ubiquitous TCP/IP stacks, code that integrates network communication protocols to establish connections between devices and the Internet. The vulnerabilities, present in operating systems like the open source project FreeBSD, as well as Nucleus NET from the industrial control firm Siemens, all relate to how these stacks implement the “Domain Name System” Internet phone book. They all would allow an attacker to either crash a device and take it offline or gain control of it remotely. Both of these attacks could potentially wreak havoc in a network, especially in critical infrastructure, health care, or manufacturing settings where infiltrating a connected device or IT server can disrupt a whole system or serve as a valuable jumping-off point for burrowing deeper into a victim's network. All of the vulnerabilities, discovered by researchers at the security firms Forescout and JSOF, now have patches available, but that doesn't necessarily translate to fixes in actual devices, which often run older software versions. Sometimes manufacturers haven't created mechanisms to update this code, but in other situations they don't manufacture the component it's running on and simply don't have control of the mechanism. “With all these findings, I know it can seem like we’re just bringing problems to the table, but we're really trying to raise awareness, work with the community, and figure out ways to address it,” says Elisa Costante, vice president of research at Forescout, which has done other, similar research through an effort it calls Project Memoria. “We've analyzed more than 15 TCP/IP stacks both proprietary and open source and we've found that there's no real difference in quality. But these commonalities are also helpful, because we've found they have similar weak spots. When we analyze a new stack, we can go and look at these same places and share those common problems with other researchers as well as developers.” The researchers haven't seen evidence yet that attackers are actively exploiting these types of vulnerabilities in the wild. But with hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of devices potentially impacted across numerous different findings, the exposure is significant. Siemens USA chief cybersecurity officer Kurt John told Wired in a statement that the company “works closely with governments and industry partners to mitigate vulnerabilities … In this case we’re happy to have collaborated with one such partner, Forescout, to quickly identify and mitigate the vulnerability." The researchers coordinated disclosure of the flaws with developers releasing patches, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other vulnerability-tracking groups. Similar flaws found by Forescout and JSOF in other proprietary and open source TCP/IP stacks have already been found to expose hundreds of millions or even possibly billions of devices worldwide. Issues show up so often in these ubiquitous network protocols because they've largely been passed down untouched through decades as the technology around them evolves. Essentially, since it ain't broke, no one fixes it. “For better or worse, these devices have code in them that people wrote 20 years ago—with the security mentality of 20 years ago,” says Ang Cui, CEO of the IoT security firm Red Balloon Security. “And it works; it never failed. But once you connect that to the Internet, it’s insecure. And that’s not that surprising, given that we've had to really rethink how we do security for general-purpose computers over those 20 years.” The problem is notorious at this point, and it's one that the security industry hasn't been able to quash, because vulnerability-ridden zombie code always seems to reemerge. “There are lots of examples of unintentionally recreating these low-level network bugs from the '90s,” says Kenn White, co-director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “A lot of it is about lack of economic incentives to really focus on the quality of this code.” There's some good news about the new slate of vulnerabilities the researchers found. Though the patches may not proliferate completely anytime soon, they are available. And other stopgap mitigations can reduce the exposure, namely keeping as many devices as possible from connecting directly to the Internet and using an internal DNS server to route data. Forescout's Costante also notes that exploitation activity would be fairly predictable, making it easier to detect attempts to take advantage of these flaws. Visit OUR FORUM to learn more.  FLoC is a recent Google proposal that would have your browser share your browsing behavior and interests by default with every site and advertiser with which you interact. Brave opposes FLoC, along with any other feature designed to share information about you and your interests without your fully informed consent. To protect Brave users, Brave has removed FLoC in the Nightly version of both Brave for desktop and Android. The privacy-affecting aspects of FLoC have never been enabled in Brave releases; the additional implementation details of FLoC will be removed from all Brave releases with this week’s stable release. Brave is also disabling FLoC on our websites, to protect Chrome users learning about Brave. Companies are finally being forced to respect user privacy (even if only minimally), pushed by trends such as increased user education, the success of privacy-first tools (e.g., Brave among others), and the growth of legislation including the CCPA and GPDR. In the face of these trends, it is disappointing to see Google, instead of taking the present opportunity to help design and build a user-first, privacy-first Web, proposing and immediately shipping in Chrome a set of smaller, ad-tech-conserving changes, which explicitly prioritize maintaining the structure of the Web advertising ecosystem as Google sees it. For the Web to be trusted and to flourish, we hold that much more is needed than the complex yet conservative chair-shuffling embodied by FLoC and Privacy Sandbox. Deeper changes to how creators pay their bills via ads are not only possible, but necessary. The success of Brave’s privacy-respecting, performance-maintaining, and site-supporting advertising system shows that more radical approaches work. We invite Google to join us in fixing the fundamentals, undoing the harm that ad-tech has caused, and building a Web that serves users first. The rest of this post explains why we believe FLoC is bad for Web users, bad for sites, and a bad direction for the Web in general. FLoC harms privacy directly and by design: FLoC shares information about your browsing behavior with sites and advertisers that otherwise wouldn’t have access to that information. Unambiguously, FLoC tells sites about your browsing history in a new way that browsers categorically do not today. Google claims that FLoC is privacy improving, despite intentionally telling sites more about you, for broadly two reasons, each of which conflate unrelated topics. First, Google says FLoC is privacy preserving compared to sending third-party cookies. But this is a misleading baseline to compare against. Many browsers don’t send third-party cookies at all; Brave hasn’t ever. Saying a new Chrome feature is privacy-improving only when compared to status-quo Chrome (the most privacy-harming popular browser on the market), is misleading, self-serving, and a further reason for users to run away from Chrome. Second, Google defends FLoC as not privacy-harming because interest cohorts are designed to be not unique to a user, using k-anonymity protections. This shows a mistaken idea of what privacy is. Many things about a person are i) not unique, but still ii) personal and important, and shouldn’t be shared without consent. Whether I prefer to wear “men’s” or “women’s” clothes, whether I live according to my professed religion, whether I believe vaccines are a scam, or whether I am a gun owner, or a Brony-fan, or a million other things, are all aspects of our lives that we might like to share with some people but not others, and under our terms and control. FLoC adds an enormous amount of fingerprinting surface to the browser, as the whole point of the feature is for sites to be able to distinguish between user interest-group cohorts. This undermines the work Brave is doing to protect users against browser fingerprinting and the statistically inferred cohort tracking enabled by fingerprinting attack surface. Google’s proposed solution to the increased fingerprinting risk from FLoC is both untestable and unlikely to work. Google proposes using a “privacy budget” approach to prevent FLoC from being used to track users. First, Brave has previously detailed why we do not think a “budget” approach is workable to prevent fingerprinting-based tracking. We stand by those concerns, and have not received any response from Google, despite having raised the concerns over a year ago. And second, Google has yet to specify how their “privacy budget” approach will work; the approach is still in “feasibility-testing” stages. Google is aware of some of these concerns, but gives them shallow treatment in their proposal. For example, Google notes that some categories (sexual orientation, medical issues, political party, etc.) will be exempt from FLoC, and that they are looking into other ways of preventing “sensitive” categories from being used in FLoC. Google’s approach here is fundamentally wrong. First, Google’s approach to determining whether a FLoC cohort is sensitive requires (in most cases) Google to record and collect that sensitive cohort in the first place! A system that determines whether a cohort is “sensitive” by recording how many people are in that sensitive cohort doesn’t pass the laugh test. Second, and more fundamental, the idea of creating a global list of “sensitive categories” is illogical and immoral. Whether a behavior is “sensitive” varies wildly across people. One’s mom may not find her interest in “women’s clothes” a private part of her identity, but one’s dad might (or might not! but, plainly, Google isn’t the appropriate party to make that choice). Similarly, an adult happily expecting a child might not find their interest in “baby goods” particularly sensitive, but a scared and nervous teenager might. More broadly, interests that are banal to one person, might be sensitive, private or even dangerous to another person. The point isn’t that Google’s list of “sensitive cohorts” will be missing important items. The point, rather, is that a “privacy preserving system” that relies on a single, global determination of what behaviors are “privacy sensitive,” fundamentally doesn’t protect privacy, or even understand why privacy is important. Visit OUR FORUM for more.
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