Google wants to change the way we're tracked around the web, and given the widespread use of its Chrome browser, the shift could have significant security and privacy implications—but the idea has been less well-received by companies that aren't Google.
The technology in question is FLoC, or Federated Learning of Cohorts, to give it its full and rather confusing name. It aims to give advertisers a way of targeting ads without exposing details on individual users, and it does this by grouping people with similar interests together: Football fans, truck drivers, retired travelers, or whatever it is.
"We started with the idea that groups of people with common interests could replace individual identifiers," writes Google's Chetna Bindra. "This approach effectively hides individuals 'in the crowd' and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser."
These groups (or "cohorts") are generated through algorithms (that's the "federated learning" bit), and you'll get put in a different one each week—advertisers will only be able to see its ID. Any cohorts that are too small will get grouped together until they have a least several thousand users in them, to make it harder to identify individual users.
FLoC is based on the idea of a Privacy Sandbox, a Google-led initiative for websites to request certain bits of information about users without overstepping the mark. Besides FLoC, the Privacy Sandbo ..
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