What is Google FLoC? And how does it affect your privacy?

Google wants Change the way we track And considering the widespread use of its Chrome browser, this shift may have a significant impact on security and privacy. But this idea is not very popular among companies that are not Google.

The technology in question is FLoC, the United Learning Alliance, named after its complete and rather confusing name. It aims to provide advertisers with a way to target ads without revealing details to individual users, and it works by grouping people with similar interests (football fans, truck drivers, retired travelers, or anyone else) into one achieve.

“We started with the idea that people with common interests can replace personal identifiers,” Written by Google’s Chetna Bindra. “This method effectively hides the individual from the crowd and uses the processing functions on the device to keep the individual’s web history in the browser.”

These groups (or “cohorts”) are generated by algorithms (ie “joint learning” bits), and you will get a different group every week-advertisers can only see their IDs. Any smaller cohorts will be grouped together until there are at least thousands of users in them, making it more difficult to identify individual users.

FLoC is based on Privacy sandbox, This is an initiative led by Google, the website can ask users to provide certain information about users, but will not exceed the requirements of the trademark. In addition to FLoC, the “privacy sandbox” also covers other technologies: preventing advertising fraud, helping website developers analyze their incoming traffic, and measuring advertising effects.

Google hopes that FLoC will replace the traditional way of tracking people on the Internet. These small amounts of text and codes are stored on your computer or phone through the browser. They can help the website determine whether you have visited the website before, your website preferences, your geographical location, and so on. They are helpful to the website and its visitors, but advertisers and data brokers also use them extensively to build our browsing history patterns.

As google Point out, Cookie tracking has become increasingly intrusive. Embedded, far-reaching trackers (called third-party cookies) keep users’ tags as they move across multiple websites, and advertisers also use an intrusive technology called fingerprint recognition, even if anti-tracking is turned on Measures, you can also know who you are (by using fonts, computer ID, connected Bluetooth devices or other means).