Security News > 2021 > March > EFF urges Google to ground its FLoC: 'Pro-privacy' third-party cookie replacement not actually great for privacy

With the arrival of Google Chrome v89 on Tuesday, Google is preparing to test a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that it hopes will replace increasingly shunned, privacy-denying third-party cookies.

Bennett Cyphers, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues FLoC is "a terrible idea," and urges Google to refocus its efforts on building a web that serves the people who use it.

FLoC is one component in Google's so-called Privacy Sandbox, a set of technical proposals that Google and other ad tech firms have been working on to replace the third-party cookie, which Google last year said it would stop supporting after competing browser makers began blocking them by default.

FLoC cohorts are intended to represent large, general interest groups; more specific behavioral ad targeting - narrowing FloC groups down - will be handled by related schemes like Turtledove and others proposals all with bird-themed names that are also due for testing soon.

Google's own engineers acknowledge that FLoC's privacy story remains half-baked, noting for example that FLoC currently "Creates a new fingerprinting surface in that it provides the same value across sites."

The company self-evaluated FLoC and its responses indicate that FLoC's implementation adequately addresses security and privacy concerns, at least to the extent an Origin Trial can begin.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/03/05/eff_google_floc/