Google Chrome seems to have taken data privacy seriously as it is ditching its usual cookies technology to be replace it by FloC technology. The technology has already been rolled to some chrome users (say 0.5%) from the first week of April this year and news is out that the services were offered to every 1 in every 200 people from countries such as India, United States, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Australia and Canada leaving UK populace because of GDPR.
Earlier, third-party cookies allowed companies track down users who surf web and serve them with relevant ads- based on their browsing history, their age and gender profile.
As this technology was following web surfers without their permission, Safari and Firefox said goodbye to this tech long back. The Alphabet Inc subsidiary is said to follow the suit by bidding goodbye to the tech of cookies by replacing it with FLoC in coming months.
Google FLoC- Federated Learning of Cohorts will help users keep their activity private from firms that snoop their web activity. It instead serves the users with similar content that those of the same age group and mind watched comparatively.
Sources from the web search giant predict that Federated learning of Cohorts will be based on the activity of groups that might be made up by 800-1000 individuals. Each person’s identity will be kept under wraps and instead their profile will be tagged with a number through an AI based algorithm called SimHash.
Thus from now on, the numerical ID will be shared with companies that intend to publicize their products and services to individuals active online.
Even large companies like Google and Facebook will from now on be able to analyze the interests, demographics, past browsing history of numerically tagged users cutting down the need to identify them with an individualistic profile.
Now to those who would like to know whether their profile is/has been made as a guinea pig for the above stated Google ad tech experiment, here’s a way to find. Just type in ‘Am I being FloCed’ or amifloced.org from your chrome browser and follow the steps to know more.
