Third-party cookies are reaching the end of their life. Faced with Internet users increasingly worried about their privacy, browsers are gradually moving away from it. But now the FLoC arrives in its turn…
The FloC is the noise of communicating vessels of tracking on the Internet.
Threatened by the decreasing use of third-party cookies, which can now be more easily refused on the websites we visit, some, such as the most monopolistic American search engine for example, circumvent what they think is a problem: your freedom of choice and the protection of your privacy. FLoC, for Federated Learning of Cohorts, is thus a new way of exploiting browsing data (and therefore our privacy) thanks to artificial intelligence that studies the behavior of cohorts of users in a federated way.
Concretely, this technology makes it possible to place an Internet user in a group of people who share his habits and interests. Thus, instead of studying the individual behavior of the person and serving him the advertisements that correspond to him, the FLoC peels the behavior of a group of people who resemble each other, and mutualizes the corresponding attributes, by providing websites with a cohort ID. The more cohort IDs with few different people, the more precise the targeting.
FLoC was made possible by a combination of two factors:
– On the one hand, the obsession to continue tracking and targeting users.
– On the other hand, the ability to exploit a pool of profiles large enough to be able to accurately extract groups with similar behaviors.
While more and more Internet users are sensitive to the use that is made of their personal data, the will of the American giant is very clear: the company wants to continue in the field of data collection and advertising targeting. The collective nature of the analysis does not change much: it will be easy to transcribe the ID of the user to know his cohort, and to deduce the attributes that are assigned to him. The visit of certain sites, the interest in certain articles, the purchase of certain products… Everything is used to refine the profile. In addition, the identifier that reveals elements of your personality is sent to all sites that request it, without you even having to give your permission.
Mastering the targeting elements through the categorization of a very large number of users is also a way for this player to aggravate its monopoly everywhere: the information obtained by a technology such as FLoC will only be relevant if it comes from a particularly large sample. Therefore, it will be much more complicated for the competition to defend a difference… and regulate market prices. The new system has already attracted the attention of some antitrust regulators in the United States.
Many Internet users are now wondering which tracking method is the least intrusive between cookies and FLoC? It is actually a non-choice, we do not choose between two bad solutions. It is the entire tracking, because it aims to influence our decisions and our knowledge according to a more or less relevant profile, which must be refused.
The alternative is of course to find services that you like and that respect your freedoms, your privacy and your freedom of thought. Starting with the search engine you use.
At Qwant, we have been dealing with the problem for a long time by proving that an ethical Internet without tracking is possible. It remains to convince a good number of advertisers that ethical advertising is possible, and that it is effective. Advertisers keep the Internet free to use, and provide the means to finance salaries and infrastructure, such as servers for example.
Beyond the question of the advertising model, as you will have understood, this raises major questions in terms of the model of society, individual freedom and democracy. In particular, that of continuing to want to offer an Internet based on the profiling of Internet users, thus depriving them of their ability to have a holistic and neutral vision of the web. By dint of “personalization” or affiliation to a caste according to his previous navigations, the individual is imposed content supposed to correspond to his interests, depriving him of the possibility of discovering other points of view. In short, to be able to form an informed opinion and to form convictions.
Today, hundreds of companies are taking up the subject of respecting private data and trust Qwant for their online campaigns. They benefit from expertise without tracking, and can reach a new target of engaged consumers, those who are so talked about. And it is to these virtuous consumers that Qwant is now addressing.
Your privacy must remain completely private. Your freedom of thought can only be absolute. You do not have to undergo tracking and submit to all forms of ready-to-think… Whether through cookies or FLoC, your data should not be used to pre-format the web you access every day and content suggestions should no longer lock you in.
Rest assured, it’s not too late. For a web without tracking and a free internet, join us. At Qwant, no cookies and no FloC!
See you soon on www.qwant.com
