With the full understanding that killing 3rd-party cookies in its very popular Chrome browser would impact practically every advertiser, Google, the world’s largest seller of advertising, offered its idea of a replacement: FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Instead of allowing advertisers to collect your browser history, the idea is to have your device analyze your data locally and only make a list of your interests available.
To make a long story short, practically everyone but Google hates the idea. Unsurprisingly, the privacy extremists hate it because it’s still a form of tracking, while the data-promiscuous hate it because even though it will add billions of data points, it won’t surface enough actionable data. It seems like FLoC is for the birds. OK, Google! What are you going to do?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.