Google announce it is implementing Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) which is an essential part of its Privacy Sandbox project for Google Chrome.
Also Google announce that soon it will stop websites from registering third-party cookies.
Google is currently testing FLoC in India, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, and the US.
Google plans to roll out the trial version to other regions eventually.
What is FLoC?
- FLoC is to be an alternative to third-party cookies for advertisement targeting.
- FLoC runs locally and categorises your browsing behaviour that groups together like-minded users into a cohort.
- It will enable users to hide within crowds of people with similar interests and search histories.
- Cohort enables advertisers to target people based on their interests while maintaining privacy for individual users.
- A new approach to interest-base advertising that both improves privacy and gives publishers a tool they need for viable advertising business models.
- The new system will group users with similar interests also giving the advertisers the benefit of target marketing as well as providing privacy to users.
- The users will become a part of a group call cohorts that are define by similarities in browsing history.
- FLoC will also not share users browsing data with Google or any other advertiser.
- Cohort is identify by a special number which is FLoC ID and that is the only thing share when requested by a website.
- Chrome will also not share cohorts that it deems sensitive.
- If users of a cohort are accessing websites with sensitive content such as religious or political content at a high rate.
- FLoC will not share such data with the advertisers.
Most browsers have completely blocked ads or third-party cookies.
Chrome is instead looking for ways to make users a little less vulnerable to cookies with FLoC.
Remember Google can’t completely block cookies on its browser as it is the main source of revenue for the company.
Google holds majority of the market share by way of Chrome in the browser spectrum and Google Ad Sense in the advertising spectru.
FLoC may just become a standard for preventing third-party cookies in the future.
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