Will FLoC change advertising?

In the midst of the fight for greater protection of personal data on the Internet, many companies are trying to offer users the safest possible services. Mozilla , for example, came out with the new Firefox 86 that provides total cookie protection. Of course, Google did not stand aside and launched a much broader initiative on this issue. Google has split its replacement of third-party cookies between advertisers and users, which can lead to concerns on both sides. The company announced that its ads will be powered by one of its privacy initiatives, called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). FLoC is part of the Sandbox initiative, which was announced as a way to reduce unwanted tracking, while enabling ad targeting in Google ‘s Chrome browser.

Google first announced Sandbox as a privacy solution back in 2019, as a planned replacement for third-party browser cookies.

“We want to find a solution that truly protects user privacy and also helps keep content freely available on the Internet. A secure personalization environment that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure ads are still relevant to users, but would reduce user data shared with websites and advertisers by anonymizing user data and keeping much more user data only on the device. “

FLoC and changes in advertising

FLoC is a method that allows a search engine to advertise based on user interests. It works by collecting data about users’ browsing habits and then grouping groups of users with similar interests into cohorts. The origin of the word cohort is interesting. A cohort was an infantry fighting unit in ancient Rome. Today cohort figuratively means a group, a set of interconnected people. The algorithm used to develop those cohorts may, among other factors, review the URLs of websites that a user has visited, as well as the content of those pages. Cohort information is then shared for advertising purposes.

Data about individual users is stored locally, in the browser, and it only uses the cohort ID. Cohorts would ideally include enough people to make it difficult to identify any individual in the group, but also specific enough to allow effective ad targeting. Users are assigned to new cohorts weekly, based on browsing data from the previous week. With third-party cookies, this data could be stored on one of their servers, which certainly compromised privacy.

Google claims that the FLoC model protects individual privacy, but still allows advertisers to see necessary user data. This change could especially require adjustments for advertisers who rely heavily on Google ads.

Google primarily owns a hugely profitable advertising business, as well as the Chrome browser, which means its replacement of third-party cookies must satisfy both advertisers and users, and advocates on both sides are concerned about how FLoC will affect them.

Google announced testing, for now without Europe

Google has announced that it is conducting various tests of this new targeting method. The findings of those experiments can be the basis for their final application. Therefore, you should make an effort to be constantly informed so that you can better prepare your business and/or clients for this change.

There are always ways you can position your agency and your clients to still achieve good advertising results when the changes finally happen.

Europe has been spared for now

FLoC, Google ‘s alternative to third-party cookies, will not be tested in Europe, at least for now. Countries covered by the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive will not participate. FLoC is likely not compatible with European privacy law, so Google will not continue FLoC testing in Europe. With this data collection system, they could say that Google is somehow becoming the arbiter of privacy, which is not in line with the broad legislation on privacy and data collection in Europe.

However, one should pay attention to the statement of one of the officials from Google : ” We are starting this testing of FLoC for users in the US and other selected countries, and we expect to make FLoC available for testing worldwide later. ” And if the official Google ‘s position is that testing is expected to become available all over the world, so we should not be surprised if in the foreseeable future FLoC comes to life in our country.

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