Google set out to find replacements for Cookies (cookies), these tracers that allow the online search giant to sell ultra-personalized advertising space, but which bristle defenders of data privacy.
The Californian group is working on an alternative system, supposed to improve respect for privacy while allowing brands to continue to target the audience they want.
“This approach hides individuals (in the crowd) and uses the computing of the device to keep a person’s history private in the browser,” Chetna Bindra, Product Manager, explained during the presentation on last month of this system dubbed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).
Instead of targeting Internet users individually, advertisers will target audience segments – the “FLoCs” – comprising hundreds or thousands of people. Google will define these segments based on user navigation.
Google plans to start testing FLoCs with brands on its Chrome browser within the year.
“The results [de nos études] show that FLoCs are effective in generating audiences based on user interests, and thus replacing witnesses, ”continued Chetna Bindra.
“Advertising is essential to keep the web open to everyone, but the web ecosystem is at risk if data privacy practices are no longer aligned with expectations.”
The Mountain View company in Silicon Valley has been widely criticized by Western authorities and digital rights NGOs over the issue of user privacy.
Witnesses of others
The growing disgust for witnesses, synonymous with continuous tracking, was part of Brussels’ motivations when MEPs voted for the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which guarantees users certain rights over their data ( how they are collected and used, for commercial purposes or not).
California has followed in the footsteps of the Old Continent with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a similar text in force for more than a year.
Google, which dominates the global digital advertising market, therefore has every interest in finding a way to reassure public opinion while satisfying advertisers anxious not to send their messages in a vacuum.
Some Cookies fulfill a purely utilitarian role. Each time a user arrives on a page that asks for their contact details, if they are displayed directly in the windows, it is thanks to these small text files which collect data as they navigate.
Others are less innocent.
“The Cookies third parties are a privacy nightmare, ”notes Bennet Cyphers, researcher with the NGO Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“You don’t have to know everything about everyone just to run an ad to them.”
He advocates the use of context, such as advertisements for ingredients alongside cooking recipes.
Safari (Apple) and Firefox browsers block by default Cookies third, but they’re still used by Chrome, which accounted for 63% of the market in 2020, according to StatCounter.
FloCs risk the flop
Third-party cookies “weigh heavily on Google, both in times of competition and legal issues, but they want to be sure that their advertising business model is running at full speed,” says Bennet Cyphers.
Like other experts, he fears that Google has invented a new opaque system that classifies Internet users in boxes and assigns them labels to guide advertising messages without any transparency.
“There is a risk that it will be even worse in terms of respect for confidentiality,” he notes.
“It’s a black box of machine learning [apprentissage automatisé de la machine] which will aggregate all the details of what you do online and spit out a badge indicating that you are such and such a person ”.
He believes that advertisers will be able, from the labels, to infer ages, gender or skin color, which people have extreme political views, etc.
FLoCs don’t necessarily make advertisers salivate either.
A coalition called Marketers for an Open Web [Les professionnels du marketing pour un web ouvert] campaigned against the new system, whose effectiveness she questioned.
She also fears that it will trap companies even more in the closed ecosystem of Google, which sells advertising space, but also services as intermediaries between sites and advertisers.
“Google’s proposals are bad for independent media, for independent ad technology and for professionals,” Coalition director James Rosewell said in a statement.