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Google today announced the rollout of Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a crucial part of its Privacy Sandbox for Chrome project, as an original developer trial.
FLoC is intended to be an alternative to the type of cookies that ad technology companies use today to track you around the web. Instead of a personally identifiable cookie, FLoC runs locally and analyzes your browsing behavior to group you into a cohort of like-minded people with similar interests (and does not share your browsing history with Google). This cohort is specific enough to allow advertisers to do their job of showing you relevant ads, but not specific enough to allow marketers to identify you personally.
This “interest-based advertising,” as Google likes to call it, allows you to hide among the crowd of users with similar interests. All browser views are a cohort ID and all of your browsing history and other data remains locally.
Image credits: Google / Getty Images
The trial will begin in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and the Philippines. Over time, Google plans to expand it globally. As we learned earlier this month, Google isn’t doing any testing in Europe due to concerns about GDPR and other privacy regulations (in part, because it’s unclear whether credentials FLoC should be considered personal data under these regulations).
Users will be able to opt out of this original trial, just as they will be able to opt out of all other Privacy Sandbox trials.
Unsurprisingly, given how FLoC is shaking up many existing online advertising systems, not everyone likes this idea. Advertisers obviously like the idea of being able to target individual users, although preliminary data from Google shows that using these cohorts leads to similar results for them and that advertisers can expect to see “at least 95 % of conversions per dollar spent versus technology-based advertising cookies. “
Google notes that its own advertising products will have the same access to FLoC IDs as its competitors in the advertising ecosystem.
But it’s not just the advertising industry that is looking at this project with skepticism. Privacy advocates aren’t entirely convinced of the idea either. The EFF, for example, argues that FLoC will make it easier for marketing companies to want to fingerprint users based on the different FLoC IDs they expose, for example. This is something Google is addressing with its privacy budget proposal, but how well it will work remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, users would probably prefer to just browse the web without seeing any ads (no matter what the ad industry has us believe) and without having to worry about their privacy. But online publishers continue to rely on advertising revenue to fund their sites.
With all of these competing interests, it was always clear that Google’s initiatives weren’t going to please everyone. This friction has always been built into the process. And while other browser vendors can block third-party ads and cookies outright, Google’s role in the advertising ecosystem makes it a bit more complicated.
“When other browsers started blocking third-party cookies by default, we were excited about management, but worried about the immediate impact,” writes Marshall Vale, Google product manager for Privacy Sandbox, in the announcement. today. “Excited because we absolutely need a more private website, and we know third-party cookies aren’t the long-term solution. Concerned that today many publishers are relying on cookie-based advertising to support their content efforts, and we had seen that blocking cookies is already leading to invasive workarounds (such as fingerprints) that were even worse for user privacy. Overall, we felt that blocking third-party cookies outright without viable ecosystem alternatives was irresponsible, if not harmful, to the free and open web that we all benefit from. “
It should be noted that FLoC, along with other Google privacy sandbox initiatives, is still under development. The company says the idea here is to learn from these initial trials and evolve the project accordingly.
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