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Google announced the Privacy Sandbox in 2019 to create a more private website using open standards. The more ambitious aspect is the phasing out of support for third-party cookies, with Google Chrome now launching a developer test of Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).
In today’s announcement, Google summed up how “excited” it is that other browsers are blocking third-party cookies by default, but “worried because today many publishers rely on the cookie-based advertising to support their content efforts. Additionally, in light of the cookie blocking, there has been an increase in device fingerprints and other privacy invasive workarounds.
Overall, we felt that blocking third-party cookies outright without viable ecosystem alternatives was irresponsible, and even harmful, to the free and open web that we all benefit from.
Google’s alternative is called Federated Learning of Cohorts and has three main poles. FLoC works by group together thousands of users with similar browsing histories in a “cohort” created by machine learning on the device analyzing your web history. The list of sites you visit do not exit your browser (federated learning), only the “cohort identifier” is revealed and used for advertising.
Cohorts are defined by similarities in browsing history, but they are not based on who you are individually. In fact, the cohort you belong to changes frequently as your browsing history changes.
Unlike third-party cookies, individual tracking is not possible with FLoC. Meanwhile, the browser will not create groups deemed “sensitive”.
Before a cohort becomes eligible, Chrome analyzes it to see if the cohort is visiting pages with sensitive topics, such as medical websites or websites with political or religious content, at a high rate. If so, Chrome ensures that the cohort is not being used, without knowing the sensitive topics that users were interested in.
Today, FLoC is becoming a home developer test in Google Chrome for a “small percentage of users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico , New Zealand, the Philippines and the United States ”.
If you have chosen to block third-party cookies with the current version of Chrome, you will not be included in these original trials. In April, we’ll be introducing a control in Chrome’s settings that you can use to turn off inclusion in FLoC and other Privacy Sandbox proposals.
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