On Monday, Google released some more details on its proposed third-party cookie tracking alternative, a “privacy-first” technology that from any angle looks just another way for the company to maintain its stranglehold on digital advertising sales.
Google calls its new creation “Federated Learning of Cohorts(FLoC for short) and promises that it’s not just a less creepy alternative to the third-party cookies and trackers we came to know and abhor Over the years, however, one that will not cause harm has reduced the profits of its advertisers. Like most things in adtech, the full proposal is both complicated and technical as hell, but in a nutshell, while cookies allow advertisers to target people based on their individual on the internet, FLoC would actually put people in specific groups (called ‘so-called’ herds’) based on their derived interests. Any data generated on an individual basis will be kept in the browser and the only thing advertisers can follow and target is a ‘flock’ containing a group of semi-anonymous people.
As an example, I can tell you that I recently became the proud owner of a Kitspot, and has visited numerous Instant Pot sites over the past few days recipes, hacks, en how to do which always drops third-party cookies into my Chrome browser, calling me a potential fan of the instant. The way digital advertising works now immediately, these types of cookies can be used to target me with instant Pot-adjacent ads on the internet, even if it is quite so skew me out. Because these cookies are kept in the browser I use to navigate the web – Chrome, in this case – is the only way I can flush the data through Chrome’s specific settings.
What happens instead of FLoC is that my Chrome browser will be watching the sites I visit and my overtime in a so-called ‘herdAlong with thousands of other Chrome users. In this particular case, my browser can capture the myriad sites I visit every day and assign me to a specific herd that is slowly boiling. Google’s advertisers can target these groups in the same way they’ve targeted cookie-based groups beforehand – a tactic that, as Google’s latest blog puts it, ‘hides individuals’ in the crowd.’
By itself, FloC does not kill third-party browser cookies, though Google has threatened to make it a reality for Chrome users. before the end of the year—But the company hopes that this new paradigm will displace them. (Do not worry, the useful kind of cookies, such as tokens that remember your subscriptions to frequently visited sites, are not sent any further.)
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FLoC is only one of the proposals that the Privacy Sandbox Project Google kicked off by the end of 2019. Like the other suggestions, these are ideas that sound decently until you start asking questions. Like the EFF in his own exposition being part of a herd of privacy sandbox is no different than being characterized by a ‘behavioral credit point’: one that remembers your interests, your purchasing history and many of the things that make you remember. you, and places it in the hands of an extremely powerful, largely irresponsible enterprise.
Plus as Google’s own technical documentation point out, it is impossible to promise that the machine learning algorithm that these groups create will not accidentally create herds based on seriously sensitive information. As we have written before, different types of data are considered “sensitive” to different people, which means that even if FLoC tries to mitigate some of these issues, users will still be at risk. As stated in the documentation:
A group can disclose sensitive information. As a first mitigation, the browser should remove sensitive categories from the data collection. But that does not mean that sensitive information can not be leaked […] It should be clear that FLoC can never prevent all abuses.
Aside from the big testing issue, it’s also worth remembering that FLoC only works if Google can still keep it unrestricted access to all our juicy user data. This ripple has led lawyers and academics in the digital privacy sphere to call bullshit on the company again and again, pointing out that Google’s privacy gimmick is actually a shit covered attempt to destroy a part of the digital advertising market while controlling everything built on its axis. At the beginning of this year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority formal investigation to examine some of these claims for themselves.
But this ongoing investigation in the UK (or any of the many other cases (currently building against the company in the US) did not stop Google from experimenting with FLoC. In the new blog, Google product manager Chetna Bindra claimed that, according to the company’s estimate, an audience targeted by their ‘herd’ tends to give advertisers virtually the same blow. Based on Google’s in-house testing, Bindra claims that advertising targeting via herds generates 95% of the same “conversions” – digital ad that describes an ad or purchases on a website below other actions—What cookie-based targeting did.
In other words, like Bindra tell CNBC, using FLoC for advertising, “is literally almost as effective as third-party cookies.” The only difference is that Google has no control a giant piece of the ad targeting ecosystem to control virtually everything.