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FLoC is Google's loophole after disabling third-party cookies in Chrome and promising they "will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they br

FLoC is Google's loophole after disabling third-party cookies in Chrome and promising they "will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web"[0]. FLoC is a new tracker to replace third-party cookies, but it works by putting users in groups and tracking those groups, so they technically aren't tracking "individuals" this time. Except you can use FLoC to track individuals by identifying them as a unique intersection of many disparate groups[1]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-replacing-third-party-cookies-privacy-sandbox https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22310332/google-privacy-re... [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100 https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100

deleted 5y ago
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pwm 5y ago
Over time everyone will be in their very own singleton group :)
- russh 5y ago
  Yes, but a totally anonymous singleton group... with a unique ID.
  - poundofshrimp 5y ago
    Not anonymous if you give your PII to create accounts on the web.
poundofshrimp 5y ago
The GH issue is interesting. Suppose each user belongs to two flocks, and each website gets randomly shown one of the two. Will this solve the problem? I’d imagine the number of possibilities after a certain while will make it impossible that cohort histories collected by two different websites will match for the same user.