Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is a part of its Privacy Sandbox, a new suite of tools aiming to replace and improve upon the conventional third-party cookie tracking that enables modern advertising on the web. The company has been working on it for more than a year, and this week it’s set to start using the system on a small portion of Chrome users in the United States and other countries.
FLoC is complicated, but in a nutshell: the idea is to replace cookies, tiny files that track your web history and other semi-personal information, with a new and more secure, less individual system. FLoC uses the browser itself to identify more broad behavior and interest groups, like, say, “sports fans” instead of “a single user who clicked on football highlight videos in YouTube.” This information is sent to advertisers, so instead of targeting ads to specific users in a system that can sometimes be so sensitive that it’s practically a digital signature, said advertisers sell ads to broad groups. Or, as the tortured abbreviation is no doubt meant to imply, flocks.
Getting rid of the individual cookie files reduces some of the risk and exposure enabled by today’s web—or so Google claims, anyway. The initial testing for the new FLoC system is part of the company’s push to remove third-party cookie tracking from all Chrome web usage by early 2022. In addition to the United States, some Chrome users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and the Philippines will be added.
Google’s efforts to make browsing more private and secure without breaking the advertising foundation that so much of the web relies upon sounds noble, and it certainly doesn’t hurt Google’s ongoing struggles with increased regulatory scrutiny. But not everyone is buying it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, sees FLoC as merely a mask for a new generation of more sophisticated tracking systems that go beyond the cookie.
