Things are changing in the way Big Tech tracks and targets users online. Recently Apple have announced an update to iOS14 which will affect the way both the adverts are served and the conversion reporting of those ads.
Additionally, Google recently announced that it planned to phase out 3rd party cookies from its Chrome browser.
In a statement over the shake up in user privacy concerns and tracking, Google stated:
“People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising,” David Temkin, Google’s director of product management, ads privacy and trust, said in a statement. “And advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising.”
But what does it mean for advertisers?
Third party cookies have provided advertisers with the data which has enabled them to target users based on their activity online – such as the types of websites they visit, previous visits and search history – pretty useful stuff for people like us.
On the face of it, you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at Google’s philanthropic approach, given that it has benefited the most from 3rd Party cookies – generating billions of dollars in advertising revenues. So why do it? Surely it will cause irreparable harm to Google’s advertisers and revenues?
All is (of course) not what it seems. Alongside the seemingly decent revocation of the cookie, Google has been cooking up its replacement. If you pardon the pun. One of which has a slightly less cute moniker of FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts.
So what the FLoC is going on?
FLoC is Google’s new profiling tool which is an opt in / opt out feature – but it’s likely that the default will be opt in as a single choice. Yes or No?
You will be familiar with websites asking you to accept their cookies or modify your choices accordingly. So here’s the first difference, Cookies ask permission on a regular basis, FLoC only needs permission once and that will be a default “yes”.
Google knows that the majority will not trouble themselves to understand how FLoC works or opt out.
Google has stated that FLoC is a 95% effective replacement for Cookies (anyone else missing the point here too?) So it’s hard to understand exactly how and why the replacement is being touted as a replacement tool to protect users’ privacy.
FLoC works by creating cohorts – that is, groups of like minded individuals based on their online behaviour and history. Google has proposed a mechanism that will count the number of users in a cohort to ensure that the numbers aren’t so small that they would impact privacy – but again, those remain unclear.
The FLoC gathers your browsing data, internet history and all of your online activity to assign you (with a user ID) into a cohort – or group of users who match a criteria.
The issues arise with the number of variables which could be used to create the cohorts and those variants still would lead to the possibility of targeting users based on their race, gender, religion, age and wealth.
It’s hardly difficult to make accurate assumptions based on the full internet history of a user, so it’s unlikely that those attributes will go unrecorded by FLoC.
The new system of FLoC is simply a summary of your recent browsing history, which isn’t a huge departure from 3rd Party Cookies.
And given that FLoC is one one of many proposals and technologies being developed as a replacement for 3rd Party Cookies, my assumption is that ad targeting will become smarter with a more generic broad spectrum ‘opt in’ policy than the individuality of Cookie tracking.
Google makes its billions by targeted advertising and that’s not ending anytime soon. Cynical much? Perhaps.
