What is Google FLoC? Google recently implemented the “Google FLoC” feature on a trial basis in Google Chrome. This feature is created to protect users’ privacy when collecting information from them in order to purposefully display ads tailored to the items they search for. But it has a lot of opponents’ capability and can make it easier for hackers to access users’ information with malicious purposes. In this article, we will examine this capability from different dimensions.
A large portion of internet traffic around the world is spent on using Google-owned apps, which includes searching the Google search engine, advertising using Google Ads, and using Google Chrome for browsing. Google has introduced the Google FLoC feature in recent years. The FLoC feature, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts, is a set of technologies that Google wants to replace with third-party cookies that will soon become obsolete.
At first glance, Google FLoC seems safe, and even if you are a Google fan, you may consider it a perfectly suitable alternative to the old way of displaying targeted ads, but on the other hand, many internet browser designer companies are completely opposed to this feature and have explicitly stated that they will disable this feature in their browsers, most likely perhaps by reading this sentence. Be what this controversial feature of Google is and why should you be careful?
Why did Google create the FLoC feature?
Let’s answer the question of what purpose Google FLoC was created and what it wants to replace before answering this question. In fact, by creating this feature, Google wants to target ads as before so that ads are displayed for each user according to what they search for, and other users’ activities are not tracked as before in order to maintain their privacy. Now websites use cookies to more easily identify their users.
Cookies are actually a tool for collecting users’ information. Usually, when you create an account on a website, the message will be displayed with a question asking you if you want your username and password to be saved;
User recognition in this way is made possible thanks to cookies. In addition, cookies are also used to track the user’s online activities and display ads to them in accordance with what he searches for, and the purpose of using them in this area is to target the display of advertisements.
Unfortunately, usually when you visit a website, the cookies used to target advertising on the site do not belong to that site and are created by another website or company, and therefore are called third-party cookies.
As we said, third-party cookies are becoming obsolete because these cookies track all users’ online activities and various individuals and companies can access your information in this way, which is a clear violation of privacy.
For this reason, there has always been quite serious criticism of third-party cookies and in recent years this feature has been disabled in many browsers. In 2019, for example, the Mozilla browser disabled this feature by default. Google Chrome developers are the biggest opponent of blocking someone’s cookies because blocking third-party cookies could potentially be the biggest threat to Google’s advertising sphere. That’s why google chrome designer officials’ ability is the biggest opposition to blocking someone’s cookies, because blocking third-party cookies could potentially be the biggest threat to Google’s advertising domain. That’s why it introduced FLoC as an alternative to third-party cookies.
In fact, Google’s goal in introducing this feature is both to protect users’ privacy and to provide a logical and defensible solution in response to serious critics of third-party cookies, and to benefit from it, and to continue to target advertising without any problems and to maintain revenue. It is interesting to note that targeted display of advertising is one of google’s main sources of monetization.
What is Google FLoC?
Simply put, these groups both completely address users’ concerns about being identified, and they remain completely anonymous in these groups and help advertisers reach their goal easily.
Browsers assign an ID to each of them to easily manage and identify cohort groups. Google claims this feature ensures the privacy of every single user. Meanwhile, revenue from targeted advertising displays using Google FLoC’s functionality is at least 95 percent of the revenue generated through targeted display of ads using third-party cookies.
Google Chrome developers recently developed a set of flat privacy technologies called Privacy Sandbox, which can both protect the privacy of people online and help marketers and business people display their business-related advertising and services to target audience groups.
By implementing Google FLoC in Google Chrome browser, another browser will not have access to your browsing history (History) and the browser will only provide the specific code of the cohort group in which you are located.
Google has pledged that the access of all applicant sites and advertisers to cohort groups is quite the same. Another of Google’s obligations regarding this feature is to prevent the use of sensitive and stressful topics to categorize cohort groups. In one sentence, Google has committed to do its best to protect users’ privacy and prevent them from being detected.
Of course, looking at the history of Google’s activities in various service areas and the motives of this large company, we understand that there have always been doubts about Google’s obligations regarding privacy and users have not fully trusted Google!
Google introduced the FLoC feature in May of this year, although several large companies in the web industry have voiced opposition to the replacement of FLoC-enabled third-party cookies. DuckDuckGo, a privacy research firm, explicitly demonstrated its serious opposition to this feature by announcing the creation of a Google Chrome extension with the FLoC blocking capability. Following this, the developers of The Brave, Vivaldy and Firefox browsers created similar browsers for their browsers. The GitHub web hosting service (Github) and wordpress web content management service have also announced that they do not support FLoC.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, also called the Electronic Foundation, has described the FLoC capability as a deplorable and terrifying idea, and it seems that the developers of Microsoft HTML, Safari and Opera browsers are also in the FLoC opposition group. Of course, all of these people agree to replace third-party cookies with a more useful tool for targeted advertising display, so now Google is the only company that has implemented FLoC functionality in its browser, Google Chrome, to target advertising!
Of course, the implementation of FLoC has some flaws that cannot be ignored! That this feature can make the Fingerprinting process easier for hackers and abusers. Fingerprinting is one of the methods of tracking users and obtaining information such as browser type, time zone, default language of your system, etc. is considered. People who obtain this information can get a set of practical information about users by putting them together. The FLoc capability can make it easier for people with malicious purposes to access information, and such people can gain broader access to information resources through this capability.
These people can only get a lot of information about you by achieving FLoC ID. However, and how Google Chrome can protect you from hackers if you use this feature will differentiate itself from other browsers in this regard, it will be determined in the future.
Meanwhile, if you use the FLoC feature and share Cohort Group data with advertisers, these people can learn more about users than ever before, for example when you log in, FLoC ID sites link you to your email address, after which hackers can reverse engineer and analyze Cohort groups. And their mechanism for obtaining information about users, learn more and more about users.
Should we block Google FLoC?
Although Google has introduced the FLoC feature as a very useful tool for protecting users’ privacy, it is also used to track users and access their information. As mentioned above, the reason for the developers of different browsers to block third-party cookies is to prevent users’ privacy defects and prevent easier access to users’ personal information, unfortunately FloC has the same problems and even more problems and disadvantages than third-party cookies! However, are these problems really useful for Google FLoc and should we use it? No doubt the answer is no!
So if you’re worried about information about your activities in cyberspace, you shouldn’t use Google’s new feature, and this feature can only be useful for you if you want ads to be displayed to fit what you search for.
Not using Google FLoc will not have the next consequence for you at all and will only deprive you of using google chrome browser so if you are used to Google Chrome, you have to accept the use of FLoC and its negative consequences! Google is currently testing out its new v,d percent feature of Google Chrome users.
Countries, where Google is trying Google FLoc, include Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand Philippines and the USA. If you are a resident of one of these countries and are using Google Chrome and want to know if you are participating in the Google FLoc pilot scheme, visit the https://amifloced.org/ website designed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Fortunately, now the number of browsers designed based on Chromium like Microsoft Edge is not less and if you are really accustomed to Google Chrome, you can choose one of them, of course the future of Google FLoc is not clear at all and maybe Google will stop using it! But it is likely that Google will continue to use it despite all the opposition to this capability. There is even the possibility that Google will officially implement the FLoC feature in Google Chrome and using this feature will help protect the privacy and reduce the consumption of Google Chrome RAM.
