A replacement for third-party cookies?
A replacement for third-party cookies?
The era of tracking users all across the web using third-party cookies is coming to a close; that type of cookie is something of a zombie at this point. All of the major browsers, save one, are blocking third-party cookies by default and the holdout, Google Chrome, plans to make that change next year. But Google, which has a business model built around advertising that benefits greatly from the status quo, has offered up an alternative scheme to "replace" third-party cookies. The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is an in-browser mechanism to pigeonhole users in a way that will be useful to advertisers, but the only reason the idea has any traction at all is because it is being implemented in Chrome—the dominant browser today.