Google keeps promising that its offer to end cookies is not a huge power

On Monday, Google released some additional details on its proposed tracking alternative to third-party cookies, a “privacy-first” technology that, from all angles, seems like just another way for the company to maintain its stranglehold on digital ad sales.

Google calls its new creation “Federated cohort learning(FLoC, for short), and promises that it’s not just a less spooky alternative to the third-party cookies and trackers we’ve arrived at. know and hate over the years, but that will not hurt to reduce the profits of its advertisers. Like most things in adtech, the full proposition is both complicated and technical like hell, but in a nutshell, while cookies allow advertisers to target people based on their individual Web browsing behavior, FLoC would essentially place people into specific groups (called “herds”) based on their inferred interests. All data generated on an individual basis would be kept in the browser and the only thing advertisers could track and the target would be a “herd” containing an aggregate group of semi-anonymized people.

As an example, I can tell you that I recently became the proud owner of a Instant pot, and have spent the last few days visiting countless sites with Instant Pot recipes, hacks, and Manual who invariably drop third-party cookies on my Chrome browser, calling me a potential Instant Pot fanatic. How digital advertising works now, this type of cookie can be used to target me with advertisements adjacent to Instant Pot on the web, even if this steals me. Since these cookies are kept in the browser I use to surf the web (Chrome, in this case), the only way to delete this data is to use Chrome. specific parameters.

With FLoC, what would happen instead is that my Chrome browser would monitor the websites I visit and, over time, group me into a so called “herd”Along with thousands of other Chrome users. In this particular case, my browser can access the myriad slow cook sites that I visit each day and assign me to a specific slow cook herd. Google advertisers could target these groups the same way they previously targeted their cookie-based groups – a tactic which, as Google’s latest blog put it, “effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd.’

By itself, FloC does not kill third-party browser cookies, although Google has threatened to make them a reality for Chrome users. before the end of the year– but the company hopes that this new paradigm will supplant them. (Don’t worry, the useful types of cookies, like tokens that remember your credentials for frequently visited sites, are not yet sent to the great beyond.)

FLoC is just one of the proposals that make up the Privacy Sandbox Project Google started towards the end of 2019. Like these other proposals, these are ideas that decent until you start asking questions. As the EFF pointed out in its own ventilation from the Privacy Sandbox, being part of a herd is reminiscent of a “behavioral credit score”: one that remembers your interests, your purchase history and a lot of what makes you you, and entrusts it to an extremely powerful and largely irresponsible company.

In addition, as technical documentation from Google points out, it’s impossible to promise that the machine learning algorithm that creates these groups will not inadvertently end up creating herds based on extremely sensitive information. As we wrote before, different types of data are considered “sensitive” for different people, which means that while FLoC tries to alleviate some of these issues, there will always be users at risk. As the documentation states:

A cohort can reveal sensitive information. First, the browser should remove sensitive categories from its data collection. But that doesn’t mean sensitive information can’t be disclosed. […] It must be clear that FLoC can never prevent any misuse.

In addition to this huge horn issue, it’s also worth remembering that FLoC only works if Google can still keep its unimpeded access to all of our juicy user data. This wrinkle has led digital privacy advocates and academics to call bullshit about the company again and again, pointing out that Google’s privacy ploy is in fact a veiled shit attempt to kill part of the digital advertising market while controlling everything that is built from its ashes. Earlier this year, the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation to probe some of these claims for themselves.

But this ongoing investigation in the UK (or one of the many other cases currently being built against the company in the US) hasn’t stopped Google from experimenting with FLoC. In the new blog, Google Product Manager Chetna Bindra said that, according to the company’s estimate, an audience targeted by its “herd” tends to offer advertisers virtually the same value for money. Based on Google’s internal testing, Bindra claimed that ad targeting via flocs generates 95% of the same “conversions” – digital ad jargon describing clicks on an ad or purchases on a site among other actions—What cookie-based targeting did.

In other words, like Bindra Told CNBC, which uses FLoC for advertising “is literally almost as effective as third-party cookies.” The only difference is that Google no longer controls a giant piece of the advertising targeting ecosystem to control almost all of it.