Why internet communities “hate” FLoC?

Google designed FLoC to help advertisers perform behavioral targeting without third-party cookies. A browser with FLoC enabled would collect information about a user’s browsing history, then use that information to assign users to a “cohort” or group. Users with “similar” browsing habits would be grouped into the same cohort. Each user’s browser will share a cohort ID, indicating which group they belong to, with websites and advertisers.

Your cohort ID will be a summary of your recent web activities & stored locally in the user’s browser. This data then can be fetched via simple JS code, but right now it’s unclear whether there will be any restrictions on who can access it or it will be shared in any other way.

Now that is a blunder for user privacy, As per the projects Github page,

“Sites that know a person’s PII (e.g., when people sign in using their email address) could record and reveal their cohort. This means that information about an individual’s interests may eventually become public.”

“A cohort could be used as a user identifier. It may not have enough bits of information to individually identify someone, but in combination with other information (such as an IP address), it might.”

“A cohort might reveal sensitive information. As a first mitigation, the browser should remove sensitive categories from its data collection. But this does not mean sensitive information can’t be leaked.”

And more.

As a result, the FLoC project faced backlash from various fonts,

Digital privacy foundations like the EFF are in strong opposition to the idea of FLoC & calling it “the opposite of privacy-preserving technology.”

Internet giants like Amazon had blocked FLoC from its services to protect the data about users search, browse & buy harvested by google.

Google couldn’t launch its origin trail of FLoC due to GDPR.

Privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Vivaldi have said that they are going to block it on their end.

In the end, it seems Google rushed into implementing an alternate technical solution to replace third-party cookies without addressing the fundamental problem of “User-privacy”.

Google needs to correct its approach by the lessons we have learned from third-party cookies not re-invent it more finely.

Image courtesy: Google

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