Google details its work on a privacy-conscious cookie substitute, called Federated Learning of Cohorts, claims ~95% effectiveness compared to cookie-based ads
AxiosSara Fischer
Context & Ripple Effects
FLoC began as Google’s proposed privacy-conscious alternative to third-party-cookie targeting, with an effectiveness claim aimed at making the transition credible to advertisers. It soon became a Chrome Privacy Sandbox origin trial, moving the proposal from design into developer testing.
Google gives advertisers a performance benchmark for evaluating FLoC against cookie-based targeting, while positioning Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox as the route to privacy-conscious behavioral advertising.
Publishers and adtech companies face an immediate need to assess whether cohort-based targeting can support their ad products without third-party cookies.
Second-order effects
Privacy concerns around FLoC’s cohort design force Google to revise the proposed replacement, culminating in the shift to Topics rather than a continued FLoC rollout.
Advertisers, adtech companies, and publishers must prepare for browser-mediated targeting rules as Chrome begins restricting third-party cookies, rather than relying on a single cookie-compatible substitute.
Third-order effects
The sequence points to browser owners exerting more control over the technical interfaces through which digital advertising can target audiences, with privacy design and ad performance negotiated together.
Replacing third-party cookies is likely to remain an iterative standards-and-market transition: a claimed performance match alone does not settle privacy objections or implementation readiness.
The trend: Digital advertising is moving from third-party identifiers toward browser-governed, privacy-framed targeting systems whose designs can change as privacy and market-adoption pressures collide.
Google says it may have found a privacy-friendly substitute to cookies https://www.axios.com/... Conveniently, this solution also means Google *alone* will own access to this data, so no other ad platform can ever compete against them 😒 https://twitter.com/...
my hotter take on floc: even if advertisers are forced to acquiesce to google's demands on the regular, they can still call out the company's longterm gaslighting for what it is
Projects like this are going to force privacy advocates to differentiate between the specific risks of data and the wider societal risks (like behavioral influence, bias, etc) that policies on privacy are ill suited to manage https://twitter.com/...
Google engineer: “Hey, we invented a replacement for the browser cookie, and we need a friendly, easy-to-remember name like cookie” Other Google engineer: “How about FLoC, for Federated Learning of Cohorts” Everyone at Google: “Perfect!” https://www.axios.com/...
“Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that acts as an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies.” “...advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising.” https://twitter.com/...
NEW: Google says it may have found a privacy-friendly substitute to cookies - A new experiment shows big returns - Big Q for industry is, does this further entrench Google's dominance for the sake of privacy? More on @axios: https://www.axios.com/...
A system that massively favors Google dominance, focuses the ad model even more on only the model tech companies are using, and completely removes any control for publishers. (mind you, I'm not saying cookies are good either. They are not) https://twitter.com/...