What impact will Google’s new cookie replacement(FLoC) have on internet privacy?

Google has been aiming to delete cookies for years, the little files that are saved on our computers when we surf the internet and allow marketers to follow and target us. It revealed this week that it is abandoning its intended replacement, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), in favour of a new tool called Topics. What does this mean for you and your online privacy? Let’s have a brief look into Google’s new cookie replacement(FLoC) have on internet privacy.

What is FLoC?

Google’s original plan would have been to better safeguard people’s privacy by grouping them into groups – cohorts – with similar demographics or interests. Advertisers would pay to target, for instance, a group of 1000 young males in the UK with a high discretionary income who had recently purchased a bike, rather than individuals who fit that description.

FLoC was unpopular among privacy advocates, who stated that by putting together all of these little pieces of information into a larger image, it was still possible to identify people. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, FLoC will “avoid the privacy dangers of third-party cookies while creating new ones.”

That strategy is no longer in effect. “We received criticism on how to improve on our initial design, and we’ve incorporated that feedback,” said Vinay Goel, who works on Google’s Chrome web browser.

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What is the new strategy?

Topics achieve the same thing FLoC was designed to do – hide our identity and movements from advertising – but in a somewhat different method. Chrome will add code that will track the websites we visit and learn about our preferences. It will only retain this information locally for three weeks at a time and tag us all with tags from a list of 300 hobbies like “fitness” or “fashion.”

When you visit a website, your browser will give marketers access to three of these subjects at random, so they may choose which advertisements to display you. Importantly, the website and advertiser will only be able to learn about these three things about you — they will not be able to learn about your gender or race, for example.

However, some people are still concerned. “The Topics API only handles the smallest, most trivial privacy vulnerabilities in FLoC, while keeping its core intact,” stated Peter Snyder in an essay on the Brave website.

Third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are used by ad businesses to follow you as you navigate the internet, establishing a profile of you and your interests based on the sites you visit and using that information to target you with advertisements. Google’s third-party cookies are present on millions of websites, providing the firm with a wealth of information about the sites you visit, which drives a portion of its vast ad business. However, the public is growing more conscious of privacy problems, and regulators are enacting greater privacy legislation.

That’s where Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) technology comes in, which the company describes as a “privacy-first” and “interest-based” advertising solution. Chrome will employ FLoC to track a person’s online surfing patterns and then position the user in various audiences, or “cohorts,” based on those habits. Advertisers will therefore tailor their adverts to groups of people rather than individual users. So, if you’re searching for a browser that doesn’t gather your data for advertising purposes — whether as an individual or as part of an anonymous audience — you might want to try something else. (By the way, you can disable ad customization, activity tracking, and remove the data Google has gathered about you by visiting this page.

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Google believes that FLoC may provide marketers

It, while Google will still send targeted advertising to you, it will do so in a more anonymous and less invasive manner. Google believes that FLoC may provide marketers with almost the same return on investment as cookie-based tracking, and it is presently testing FLoC with advertisers to determine if it would work as a cookie substitute. FLoC may fail in the end, but Google is confident enough in it to say that cookies will die, and, once again, Google will not replace them with a comparable form of the personalised tracker.

What does this mean for site users and advertisers?

Topics will only collect data on Chrome users, while many individuals who use other browsers are likely to use Google’s online search, email, calendar, or a variety of other services, so the corporation may still collect data in this manner. Other alternatives for privacy-conscious users include Apple’s Private Relay, which allows you to surf anonymously while keeping data out of the hands of advertising.

The changes are expected to make life more difficult for marketers, who have become accustomed to having access to a multitude of data and being able to precisely target advertisements. It is in Google’s best interests to prevent this as far as standards such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) allow – after all, Google does not charge for its services and instead makes money through advertising.

Despite this, some in the advertising sector are concerned. “Topic is a dumbed-down version of FLoC,” Mike Woosley of data-collection start-up Lotame told Adweek. It’s the same contextual targeting feature that was available circa 2005. It’s not really sophisticated.”

Conclusion

Finally, while Google claims it is dedicated to creating and deploying ad technology that does not rely on monitoring and advertising to users, other firms are inventing non-cookie tracking technologies that do, and you may still be followed by them if you use Chrome (or another browser). But, for the time being, Google is exiting the cookie and individual tracking game. Consumers dislike it, laws may soon make it illegal, and, perhaps most crucially, Google does not require it.

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