Google’s FLoC gets frosty reception
FLoC is Google’s replacement for cookies, but many companies and individuals have their concerns.
Cookies – those little digital breadcrumb trails that track and identify you on the internet – are becoming ever less popular, and while that’s good news on the whole, Google is looking to replace them with FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its dominant
Chrome web browser. The company states (http://bit.ly/LXF277FLoC) that this will enable advertisers to target their ads to people, while the “approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser. “
Google claims to have run simulations that have given the company the confidence to call FLoC a “privacy-first alternative to third-party cookies” which doesn’t tie browsing activity to individuals, but to groups of ‘like-minded’ people instead. Not only that, Google also claims that “advertisers can expect to see at least 95 per cent of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.”
So, FLoC is apparently a cookie alternative that not only offers better privacy to users, but offers advertisers better results as well. Sounds too good to be true, right? Some certainly think so. The team behind DuckDuckGo, the privacyminded search engine, has voiced concerns about how Chrome users are automatically opted into FLoC, and it’ll be blocked in the search engine and DuckDuckGo browser extension. Meanwhile, other web browsers, such as
Vivaldi, Firefox, Safari and Edge won’t support FLoC either. In fact, many Chromium-based web browsers have publicly stated they won’t support FLoC, leaving Google’s Chrome to go it alone. Will this almost unanimous rejection cause Google to rethink its FLoC plans? Due to
Chrome’s dominance of web browser market share, it may make little difference.