On Monday, Google launched some more details in its alternative tracking proposal for third-party cookies, a “privacy first” technology that, from any angle, appears to be just another way for the company to maintain its 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 scary alternative to the cookies and third-party trackers we came know and hate over the years, but that doesn’t hurt, it cuts advertisers’ profits. Like most things in adtech, the full proposal is as much 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 basically put people in specific groups (called “flocks”) based on their inferred interests. Any the data generated individually would be kept in the browser and the only thing that advertisers could track and the target would be a “flock” containing an aggregate group of semi-anonymous people.
As an example, I can say that I recently became the proud owner of a Instant Pot, and I’ve spent the past few days visiting numerous sites with Instant Pot revenue, hacksand how to make who invariably place third-party cookies on my Chrome browser, labeling me as a potential Instant Pot fanatic. The way digital ads work right now, this type of cookie can be used to target me with instant ads adjacent to Pot across the web, even if it is annoys me. Since these cookies are kept inside the browser I’m using to browse the web – Chrome, in this case – the only way to be able to clear this data is through Chrome specific configurations.
With FLoC, what would happen, instead, is that my Chrome browser watched the websites I visit and, over time, put me in the so-called “flock”Along with thousands of other Chrome users. In this specific case, my browser can detect a myriad of slow-cooking sites that I visit every day and assign myself to a specific slow-cooking band. Google advertisers could target these groups in the same way that they targeted their cookie-based groups beforehand – a tactic that, as the latest Google blog says, “effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd'”.
By itself, FloC does not delete 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 that this new paradigm will replace them. (Don’t worry, the types of useful cookies, like tokens that resemble your logins to frequently visited websites, are not yet being sent to the great beyond.)
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FLoC is just one of the proposals that make up the Privacy sandbox design Google started at the end of 2019. Like these other proposals, they are ideas that seem decent until you start asking questions. As the EFF pointed out in your own collapse from Privacy Sandbox, being part of a herd is no different from being marked with a “behavioral credit score”: one that remembers your interests, your purchase history and much of what makes you you, and puts it in the hands of an extremely powerful and largely inexplicable corporation.
In addition, as Google’s own technical documentation points, it is impossible to promise that the machine learning algorithm that creates these groups will not inadvertently create flocks based on seriously confidential information. Like we wrote before, different types of data are considered “confidential” for different people, meaning that even if the FLoC tries to mitigate some of these problems, users are still at risk. As the documentation states:
A cohort can reveal confidential information. As a first mitigation, the browser should remove sensitive categories from its data collection. But that does not mean that confidential information cannot be leaked […] It should be clear that FLoC will never be able to prevent any misuse.
In addition to the big horn problem, it’s also worth remembering that FLoC only works if Google can still maintain its unrestricted access to all of our juicy user data. This wrinkle has led defenders and academics in the digital privacy sphere to denounce the company again and again, pointing out Google’s privacy ploy is actually a veiled shit attempt to kill part of the digital advertising market while controlling everything built on its ashes. Earlier this year, the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation to probe some of these claims by themselves.
But this ongoing investigation in the UK (or any of the many other cases currently building against the company in the U.S.) did not stop Google from trying FLoC. In the new blog, Chetna Bindra, product manager at Google, said that, according to the company’s estimate, a target audience of its “flock” tends to offer advertisers virtually the same return on their investment. Based on internal Google tests, Bindra said that targeting ads through herds generated 95% of the same “conversions” – jargon for digital ads that describes clicks on an ad or purchases on a website between other actions– this cookie-based targeting did.
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 no longer controls a giant piece of the ad targeting ecosystem to control just about everything.