Guest post by On OSNews we recently reported on how Google plans to remove support for third-party cookies. Many have seen this as offering a privacy boost for users, leading to a better Web where targeted ads based on web-browser behaviour are a thing of the past. The EFF takes a different view.
Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful.
FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.
Thanks @Flatland_Spider for finding and sharing this EFF article in the earlier discussion.
At the end of the day, it’s probably a good idea to use Firefox…
It doesn’t surprise me that FLoC may be just as harmful to users as third-party cookies. But as Caraibes suggested, might the more important point be that regardless of exactly how harmful FLoC is, browsers other than Chrome may decline to implement it, that may drive users away from Chrome, and Google may eventually be forced to abandon FLoC just like third-party cookies? Has there been discussion of the likelihood that this would happen?