Goodbye Cookies, Hello FLoC - What Google's Privacy Changes Mean for Marketing

By this time in 2022, Google plans to get rid of third-party cookies entirely as a part of its evolving user privacy policy. This creates an interesting challenge for digital marketing and advertising, as it makes it significantly more difficult to track customer activities on the web to deliver targeted advertising. Since advertising brings in 80% of Alphabet’s revenue (Google’s parent company), which amounted to US$147 billion in 2020, advertising is just as important to the company as user privacy. So, what’s the solution? It's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

 What the FLoC?

While it sounds like something straight out of science fiction, Federated Learning of Cohorts is a way forward that may allow Google to balance privacy and advertising more effectively. Rather than learning your identity and tracking it directly, Google will associate your activity with similar user activity, grouping people into cohorts based on interests. The idea is that you remain personally anonymous, but your interests and qualities do not.

Of course, the technology is far more complex (isn’t it always!), but here’s a quick example of how it is forecasted to work:

•  Your browser history on Chrome is never shared with anyone directly.
• Chrome scans your history itself and assigns you to specific groups based on what you search for, the websites you visit, and so on. For example, if you visit yoga websites and browse for activewear, then it assigns you a number based on that activity to group you in with other people who perform the same types of searches, say #34541.
• Digital marketers can then direct ads to people in group/cohort #34541 without knowing anything else about your identity other than that group is interested in yoga clothing.
• To protect your identity further, Google says it will not make cohort numbers accessible to advertisers until it meets a large enough threshold to sufficiently preserve individual anonymity. That means that if you are only one of three people in a specific area doing a specific thing on Google Chrome, your dark and secret love of yoga clothing won’t be able to be connected to you personally.

When Can We Expect FLoC to Be in Play?

FLoC is still in trial phases, but it does seem promising that Google will go ahead with it. And as the biggest search engine in the world and the owner of the second-largest search engine (YouTube), it’s absolutely worth paying attention to.

The most important takeaway around this development is that personal privacy is being taken seriously – it’s something all browsers, software developers, and tech giants can’t stop talking about. At the same time, the success of these businesses relies heavily on advertising. Currently, FLoC seems like an interesting way to balance privacy and ad revenue and has some key implications for marketing your business and products.

While there has been some pushback about this tech, from the fact that FLoC can still be paired with biometric tracking to loopholes where advertisers can still access individual, personal information if you log into a website account or make a purchase, it does show an important movement towards privacy.

As an individual user as well as a digital marketing specialist, I’m watching these developments with interest. I’ve always been on the side of ethical, quality marketing practices that are helpful, build trust, and help good businesses become more visible. With changes like FloC in the pipeline, it’s more important than ever to use agencies that stay on the right side of Google – and the customer.