In the midst of the fight for greater protection of personal data on the Internet, many companies are trying to offer users the most secure services possible. Mozilla has, for example, come up with a new one Firefox 86 that provides total cookie protection. Of course Google he did not stand aside and launched a much broader initiative on this issue. Google is your replacement third-party cookies distributed between advertisers and users, which can lead to concerns on both sides. The company has announced that its ads will be launched by one of its privacy initiatives, called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). FLoC is a part Sandbox initiative announced as a way to reduce past unwanted tracking, while enabling ad targeting in Googleto this browser Chrome. 

Google is the first time announced Sandbox as a privacy solution back in 2019, as a planned replacement for third-party cookies on the browser. 

"We want to find a solution that really protects users' privacy and also helps keep content freely available on the Internet. A secure personalization environment that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads remain relevant to users, but the user data shared with websites and advertisers would be reduced by anonymously collecting user data and retaining much more user data on the device alone."

FLoC and changes in advertising

FLoC is a method that allows a search engine to advertise based on user interests. It works by collecting data on user browsing habits and then grouping user groups with similar interests into cohorts. The origin of the word cohort is interesting. The cohort was an infantry fighting unit in ancient Rome. Today, a cohort figuratively means a group, a set of interconnected people. The algorithm used to develop these cohorts, among other factors, can review the URLs of the websites the user has visited, as well as the content of those pages. The cohort information is then shared for promotional purposes. 

Data on individual users is stored locally, in the browser, and it uses only the cohort ID. Cohorts would ideally include enough people to make it difficult to identify any individual in the group, but also specific enough to allow for effective ad targeting. Users are assigned to new cohorts per week, based on review data from the previous week. With third-party cookies, this data could be stored on one of their servers, which certainly compromised privacy.

Google claims that the FLoC model protects the privacy of the individual, but still allows advertisers to see the necessary user data. This change could particularly require customization by advertisers who rely heavily on Google ads.

Google primarily owns an extremely profitable advertising company, as well as browser Cchrome, which means its replacement third-party cookies must satisfy both advertisers and users, and proponents of both sides are concerned about how FLoC will affect them.

Google announced testing, without Europe for now

Google announced the implementation of various tests of this new targeting method. The findings of these experiments may be the basis for their final application. Therefore, you should make sure that you are constantly informed so that you can better prepare your business and / or clients for this change.

There are always ways you can position your agency and your clients to continue to achieve good advertising results when changes finally happen. 

Europe has been spared for now

FLOC, Googlethis alternative third-party cookies, will not be tested in Europe, at least for now. Countries covered by the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive will not participate. FLoC is probably not compatible with European privacy law, and Google will not continue with FLoC testing in Europe. These data collection system could tell Google in a way it becomes a privacy arbiter, which is not in line with broad privacy and data collection legislation in Europe.

However, one should pay attention to the statement of one of the officials from Google-a: "We are starting this FLoC testing for users in the U.S. and other select countries, and we expect to make FLoC available for testing worldwide later."And if it is an official position Google-and if testing is expected to become available worldwide, then we should not be surprised if in the foreseeable future FLoC comes to life in our country.

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