What is Google Floc? And how does it affect your privacy?

Google wants it change the tracking mode around the web, and due to the widespread use of the Chrome browser, the changes could have major security and privacy implications, but the idea that companies that don’t have Google hasn’t been so well received.

The technology mentioned is FLoC or Federated Cohort Study, to give it a full and relatively confusing name. It aims to give advertisers a way to target ads without showing details about individual users, and for this purpose it groups people with similar interests: football fans, truck drivers, retired passengers or whatever.

“We started with the idea that groups with common interests can replace individual identifiers,” writes Google’s Chetna Bindra. “This approach effectively hides people from the ‘crowd’ and uses device processing to keep a person’s web history private in the browser.”

These groups (or “cohorts”) are created using algorithms (that’s the “federated learning” bit), and another will be placed weekly – advertisers will only be able to see their ID. All small cohorts will be grouped together to have at least thousands of users, making it more difficult to identify individual users.

It is based on the idea of ​​FLoC a Privacy Sandbox, An initiative led by Google, to ask websites to request a certain piece of information about users without exceeding the mark. Along with FLoC, the Privacy Sandbox also covers other technologies: to prevent ad fraud, to help website developers analyze inbound traffic, to measure ad effectiveness, and so on.

Google wants FLoC to replace traditional ways of tracking people on the Internet: Cookies. These small pieces of text and code are stored by your browser on your computer or phone, and will help the websites you’ve visited before, what your website preferences are, the world you’re located in, and more. They can be helpful for both websites and visitors, but they are also widely used by advertisers and data brokers to build models for our browsing history.

Like Google points out, the tracking of cookies is becoming increasingly invasive. Extensive, widely tracked followers known as third-party cookies keep tabs on users as they move across multiple websites, advertisers also use an invasive fingerprinting technique to track who you are when you have anti-tracking measures turned on (your fonts, or your computer ID, Bluetooth connected) devices or other means).