On Monday, Google launched some details regarding the proposed alternative of tracking third-party cookies, a “confidential” technology, which, from any angle, seems to be just another way for the company to maintain control over digital ad sales.
Google calls its new creation “Federated cohort learning”(FLoC, for short) and promises that it’s not just a less creepy alternative to the third-party cookies and trackers we’ve come to he knows and hates over the years, but one that will not hurt, will reduce the profits of advertisers. Like most things in adtech, the complete proposal is both complicated and technical damn, but in short, while cookies allow advertisers to target people based on them individual through web browsing behavior, FLoC would essentially classify people into specific groups (called “herds”) based on their inferred interests. Anything individually generated data would be stored 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.
For example, I can tell you that I recently became a proud owner of a Instant Potand I’ve spent the past few days visiting countless Instant Pot sites prescription, hacks, and how come which invariably remove third-party cookies on my Chrome browser, labeling me as a potential Instant Pot fanatic. How digital ads work right now, these types of cookies can be used to target me with adjacent Instant Pot ads on the web, even if they are about get me out. Because these cookies are stored in the browser I use to browse the web – Chrome, in this case – the only way I could delete this data is through Chrome specific settings.
With FLoC, what would happen instead is that my Chrome browser would monitor the websites you visit and, in extra time, turn me into a so-called “flock“Along with thousands of other Chrome users. In this particular case, my browser could end up on the countless slow cooking sites you visit every day and assign me to a specific herd of slow cooking. Google advertisers could target these groups in the same way they targeted their cookie-based groups in advance – a tactic that, as Google’s latest blog says, effectively hides people “in the crowd.”
In itself, FloC does not destroy third-party browser cookies – although Google has threatened to make this a reality for Chrome users before the end of the year“But the company hopes this new paradigm will replace them.” (Don’t worry, useful types of cookies, such as tokens that remind you of login information for frequently visited sites, aren’t yet sent to the big beyond.)
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FLoC is just one of the proposals that comprise The Sandbox Privacy Policy Google started by the end of 2019. Like the other proposals, there are ideas that sound decent until you start asking questions. As the EFF pointed out in its own breakdown of the Privacy Sandbox, being part of a herd is no different than being marked with a “behavioral credit score”: one that reminds you of your interests, your purchase history, and much of what makes you you, and puts it in the hands of an extremely powerful, largely inexplicable corporation.
In addition, as Google’s own technical documentation highlights, it is impossible to promise that the machine learning algorithm that creates these groups will not, by mistake, lead to the creation of flocks based on sensitive information. As I’ve written before, different types of data are considered “sensitive” to different people, which means that even if FLoC tries to mitigate some of these issues, it will still remain users. As stated in the documentation:
A cohort could reveal sensitive information. As a first mitigation, the browser should remove sensitive categories from the data collection. But this does not mean that sensitive information cannot be disseminated […] It should be clear that FLoC will never be able to prevent any misuse.
Aside from this huge issue, it’s worth remembering that FLoC only works if Google can keep it unlimited access to all our succulent user data. This wrinkle has led lawyers and academics in the field of digital privacy to turn to company nonsense. again and again, emphasizing Google’s privacy trick is actually a veiled shit test to destroy part of the digital advertising market by controlling everything that is built on ashes. Earlier this year, the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation to research some of these statements for themselves.
But this ongoing investigation in the UK (or any of many other cases currently building against the US company) did not stop Google from experimenting with FLoC. In the new blog, Google product manager Chetna Bindra claimed that, according to the company’s estimate, an audience targeted by their “herd” tends to give advertisers practically the same bang for their dollar. Based on Google’s internal testing, Bindra claimed that targeting ads across groups generated 95% of the same “conversions” – digital advertising language that describes ad clicks or site purchases among other actions—This cookie-based targeting was successful.
In other words, like Bindra said CNBC, using FLoC for advertising, “is literally almost as effective as third-party cookies.” The only difference is that Google is out of control a huge piece of the ad targeting ecosystem to its practical control.