About two weeks ago, millions of Google Chrome users signed up for an experiment they never agreed to be a part of. Google had just launched a test for federated cohort learning (or FLoC), a new type of ad targeting technology that should be less invasive than the average cookie. In a blog post announcing the lawsuit, the company noted that it would only affect a “small percentage” of random users in ten different countries, including the United States, Mexico and Canada, with plans to expand globally as the essays.
These users probably won’t notice anything different when they click on Chrome, but behind the scenes, this browser is quietly monitoring all the sites they visit and the ads they click on. These users will have their browsing habits defined and packaged and shared with countless advertisers for profit. At some point this month, Chrome will offer users the ability to disable this experiment, according to the Google Blog post, but for now its only option is: block all third-party cookies to the browser.
That is if they even know that these tests are occurring in the first place. While I wrote mine fair To share on FLoC so far, the strongest voices I’ve seen dealing with on the subject are marketing nerds, nerds of politics, o nerds of policies working in marketing. This could be due to the fact that, apart from a few blog posts here or there: the only bread crumbs that Google gives to people who want to learn more about FLoC are inscrutable code pages, an inscrutable Replacing GitHub, and inscrutable mailing lists. Even if Google bothered to ask for consent before enrolling a random sample of their Chrome user base in this test, chances are they didn’t know what they were consenting to.
(For registration, you can check if you opted for this initial test using this useful tool of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)
Because Google doesn’t have a good track record be frank about their privacy practices, we decided to write the basics of this technology, the test, and why FLoC’s promises aren’t actually all that have been repressed.
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“Is WTF a FLoC?”
At Google own words, is a “privacy-preserving mechanism for selecting interest-based ads.” In normal human words, it is a way to track users through the web for advertising purposes, in a way that responds more to privacy than cookies and code advertisers have trusted so far; at least that’s what Google says.
“How should it work?”
It’s a bit complicated. When someone floats from one place to another across the web using a FLoC-based browser, that browser will use an internal algorithm to generate an appropriate “cohort of interest” to group that person and these cohorts will be recalculated weekly. These specific cohorts, according to Google, are made up of thousands of different users at a time, making tracking and segmenting browser-specific history almost impossible for any type of adtech.
As an example: I’m in the middle of renovating my apartment, which means I spend two hours a day clicking through store sites like West Elm, Target, IKEA and the like. In this situation, my browser could (very accurately) label me as a home decor nerd and become a cohort with thousands of other people who also spend hours staring at the couches.
At FLoC, each cohort is given a name that is a mix of letters, numbers, or both, so let’s call the HGTV home decor cohort, after the legendary channel of the same name.
Next time you visit a site for tips on, I don’t know, reupholstering my sofa, this site may ask the cohort of which I am a part. When you notice that I’m part of the HGTV cohort, the site can track my on-site behavior and the ads on the couch where I inevitably click, and then aggregate that data with other people in the same cohort who sneak in. .
From time to time, this aggregated data on what the HGTV cohort does (sofa upholstery! Removable wallpaper! Granite countertops!) Is uploaded to any ad network an individual site can work with.
Let’s say the network in question is Google Ads since almost each place uses it. If I try to browse an ad-supported news site, such as the one you’re in right now, after checking this content on the couch, this news site will also ask my browser about the cohort I’m on (HGTV).
Once resolved, my cohort ID is transmitted to the site’s associated ad networks, which naturally includes Google net. Based on the data that this ad serving system previously obtained about this cohort (i.e., they could probably use a new couch), it arrives in their later ad catalog. about 7 million different advertisers waiting to run. The ad platform finds an ad for a new couch and causes the news site, where I see it, to immediately give up the idea of re-upholstering anything and clicking.
“How is that different from the follow-up we have now?”
The crawlers that FLoC needs to replace are known as “third-party cookies.” We have a beautiful one in-depth guide to the way this kind of technology works, but in a nutshell: these are snippets of code from adtech companies that websites can include in the code that underpins their pages. These pieces of code monitor your behavior on the spot, and sometimes other personal data—Before the adtech organization behind this cookie, this information goes back to its own servers.
This is one of the key differences between FLoC and the current cookie hell we’re wrapped in. With FLoC, my strong cohort of a thousand people is the only one an external advertiser sees. Anything else, such as the names of the places I’ve visited or details about the sofas I’ve clicked on before, are stored locally in the browser. In the case of cookies, all these details are sent to an external server where the company in charge can have almost free reign: push this data to other advertising companies or may do so merge your data with data from other cookie companies or, in some cases, may provide them to the police.
That’s why Google’s tone sounds semi-appealing. Of course, you are still behaving behaviorally in what is unquestionably kind of nasty, however, at the very least, one cannot choose from a formation.
“There must be a problem here.”
The problem is that Google still has all this juicy user-level data because it controls Chrome. They are also free to continue doing what they have always done with this data: sharing it with federal agencies, accidentally filtering it, and, you know, just be Google.
“No way.”
Way.
“Isn’t that kind of … anti-competitive?”
It depends on who you ask. Competition authorities in the United Kingdom without a doubt, I think so, as they do business groups here in the US. It has also been wrapped in a file Probe of the Congress, at least one collective action, and a massive multistate antitrust case headed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Your questions with FLoC are pretty easy to understand. Google already controls around 30% of the digital ad market in the United States, a little more than Facebook, the other half of the so-called Duopoli—Which controls 25% (by context, Microsoft controls around 4%).
Although this domain has been granted to Google billions of dollars a year, has recently been offset multiple antitrust investigations against the company, too. And this research has painted almost universally an image of Google as flagrant autocrat of the advertising-based economy and that far outweighed unpleasant behavior because smaller rivals were too afraid (or unable) to speak. That’s why many of them are now talking about FLoC.
“But at least it’s good for privacy, isn’t it?”
Again, it depends on who you ask. Google believes it, but the EFF certainly does not. In March, the EFF released a detailed piece breaking some of the biggest gaps in FLoC’s privacy promises. If a particular website asks you to give up some kind of personal data (for example, if you register with your email or phone number), your FLoC identifier it’s not really anonymous month.
Aside from this hiccup, the EFF notes that your FLoC cohort follows you everywhere you go on the net. This isn’t a big deal if my cohort is just “people who like to reupholster furniture,” but it gets weird if this cohort moves unintentionally around a person’s mental health disorder or their sexuality based on the places that person navigates. . Although Google is committed to preventing FloC from creating cohorts based on this type of “sensitive categories“, Again the EFF pointed out that Google’s approach was full of holes.
“Behavior correlates with demographics in unintuitive ways,” wrote EFF technologist Bennet Cyphers. “It is very likely that certain demographic data will visit a different subset of the network than other demographic data and that this behavior will not be captured by Google ‘s’ sensitive sites’ frameworks.”
“And Google does it like better alternative to cookies? “
I know that ?????????
“How can I pass all this on to my weird uncle / father / neighbor / nephew who’s not a tech expert, but who wants to know what FLoC is all about?”
Remind them that this is a privacy product powered by Google. Google. That’s all they need to know.