Google’s new tech to track you for ads can do more harm than good, says Firefox – Times of India

Google is aiming to replace third-party cookies with its new FLoC standard for showing you relevant ads online. FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. Google claims that this new tech offers better privacy for users while tracking them for showing relevant online ads. However, Firefox creator Mozilla disagreed and said that FLoC could pose “significant” privacy risk to users.
Now the concept of FLoC is complex. Instead of advertisers making individual profiles for digital ads, FLoC will create a group of users (at least 1000) having the same interests and advertisers will be able to showcase ads to these groups. So, instead of ads-based on individual preferences, you will be part of larger anonymous groups and get ads served accordingly.
On the other hand, Mozilla explained in a blog post that “FLoC leaks more information than you want”.
“With cookie-based tracking, the amount of information a tracker gets is determined by the number of sites it is embedded on…FLoC undermines these more restrictive cookie policies: because FLoC IDs are the same across all sites, they become a shared key to which trackers can associate data from external sources,” explained Mozilla.
Google is testing FLoC on Chrome 90 and is rolling out new settings inside Privacy and Security options, but it hasn’t been widely rolled out yet. Google’s move to replace third-party cookies with FLoC hasn’t garnered much support for the tech industry. This move is unappreciated by the industry because this gives Google more control over digital advertising businesses, thus increasing Google’s revenues while third-parties may take a hit. Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox have confirmed that they have no immediate plans to adopt FLoC.
Mozilla further claimed, “FLoC is premised on a compelling idea: enable ad targeting without exposing users to risk. But the current design has a number of privacy properties that could create significant risks if it were to be widely deployed in its current form.”