Google Wants Everyone to Just Get FLoC'ed!

Google is receiving serious blowback about its plan to implement Chrome's FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) which algorithmically groups users by common traits—browsing behaviors and inferred characteristics.

The idea is to replace third party cookies by segmenting users into cohorts thus enabling "ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users."

As such, each cohort of 1,000+ users has a unique identifier, which is then presented to each website that a cohort member visits.

Google has touted FLoC as a "privacy-first" solution which critics scoff at and say it's anything but.

For instance, a joint press release from Save Journalism Project and Marketers for an Open Web (MOW) claims that Google is being disingenuous with its new "privacy" claim. MOW points out that,

Google's own document submitted to the UK Competition and Markets Authority was specific:

"Google has more data, of more types, from more sources than anyone else".

Google obtain much of this data via terms and conditions that are one sided and do not offer any real choice. When someone sets up Android, uses Gmail, searches, or uses a map they are consenting to allow Google's terms.

The corporation is not saying that it is going to stop all these data-gathering practices.

Privacy-first DuckDuckGo provides an extension to block FLoC and warns...