Privacy analysis of FLoC
Eric Rescorla,
Mozilla, Privacy,
Jun 11, 2021
As this post notes, Google is currently testing something called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in Chrome. The idea is to group people together by common interests and then serve advertisements to those groups. Obviously it would be a key part of a browser-as-social-network ('BASN'?). This post, written by an obviously interested party in Mozilla, asks about provacy implications and suggests "FLoC leaks more information than you want." I think the most worrisome aspect is that FLoC undermines 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." Essentially, the browser itself becomes the cookie. Image: MarketandGrow.
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