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The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions
by kerng 5y ago
The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript.
And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.
Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?
Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
- jefftk 5y ago> How will ad bidding work with FLoC? I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-guide#floc https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
- kerng 5y agoHow would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product? I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others. But where is that central store? Is Google running that? Might also work fundamentally different.
- jefftk 5y agoOne way an independent publisher could use FLoC is for "lookalike" targeting. For example, if your best customers often have IDs D4W1 or JQ82, you could choose to target ads at those IDs. Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one. It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.