Google has announced the discontinuation of third-party cookies in Chrome for some time, and has now started publicly testing what could be a valid, privacy-friendly alternative: the FLoCs.
Federated Learning of Cohorts technology is a methodology based on groups , rather than on the individual. Each user is placed in a “cohort” of people with the same interests, in order to generate relevant advertisements for him, without however tracking him individually and following his path for the web, which instead happens thanks to third-party cookies. It is the browser that determines the various cohorts in which to place the user based on their recent web history and the only thing that the sites visited will know about us is the identifier of said cohorts, and nothing else.
On paper it seems a good solution, certainly more privacy-friendly than the current one, but there are doubts, for example regarding the fact that this new tracking system could favor Google , already strong of a lot of first-party data, compared to competitors deprived of the information contained in third-party cookies.
Currently the FLoC trial is active in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines and USA , but only with a few users and that do not have third-party cookies already blocked in the settings of your browser. We will keep you updated on the evolution of the tests and on the death of third-party cookies in general.
