Will FLoC excise tracking from the web?

With the news that Google is to move away from individual-level identifiers for advertising in a post-cookie world, questions of what will replace them are bubbling over.

Why it matters

Ultimately, the cookie was one of the aspects of the internet (and, by extension, digital advertising) that gave it a bad name. But at least they were everyone’s problem/opportunity – what comes next could lead to a vast concentration of power.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation take

The EFF, a major non-profit that focuses on civil liberties in the digital world, eyes Google’s proposed changes with scepticism.

“The goal of FLoC and other proposals is to avoid letting trackers access specific pieces of information that they can tie to specific people,” writes technologist Bennett Cyphers in a new piece. But “FLoC may actually help trackers in many contexts”.

Its argument is that the replacement, FLoCs – which uses machine learning to form groups large clusters of people with similar browsing habits and serves ads to all of them – is simply a modern, even more centralised version of tracking.

It identifies two continued privacy problems with FLoCs:

• Fingerprinting (gathering lots of different data from a browser to create a unique, stable identifier) which is given a large head-start by the FLoC.
• “Any company able to identify a user in other ways – say, by offering “log in with Google” services to sites around the Internet – will be able to tie the information it learns from FLoC to the user’s profile.”
  

Meanwhile, as Campaign Asia pointed out, the announcement that Google wouldn’t be taking part in identifiers had a strong knock-on effect on other industry efforts to move beyond cookies, drawing accusations that the move was an attempt to undermine confidence in other initiatives.

Sourced from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Campaign Asia, WARC