An Insider Perspective on Google FLoC

With the recent news about the future of cookie-less online advertising, I wanted to spend some time today diving into information straight to the horse’s mouth: a blog post by Google’s Chetna Bindra, Group Product Manager, User Trust and Privacy. 

Bindra uses this post to highlight some of the features that Google is looking to implement into their Privacy Sandbox, a project focused on creating solutions that put consumer privacy first. 

FLoC - Federate Learning of Cohorts - is a technology that allows businesses to reach people with relevant messaging to their interests, much like cookies were able to do in the past. Per Bindra,“this approach effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.” 

Essentially, by grouping people in large interest-based buckets, advertisers can send targeted messages without seeing the individual within the bucket. 

FLoC isn’t the only new technology Google is cooking up, though. Here are two other great ideas that Google’s Privacy Sandbox is testing, all directly from Bindra’s blog post and with the ultimate goal of protecting consumer privacy for Google Chrome users: 

Audience creation: Google has solicited proposals from RTB House as well as other leading advertising firms around how marketers can deploy their own audience without cookies, such as when a website remarkets to previous visitors. One proposal called FLEDGE would use a “trusted server” to store ad campaign bids and budgets. 

Conversion measurement: One of the largest challenges of advertising without cookies is how to measure ad efficacy and determining incrementality. Google is testing solutions to these problems such as “aggregating information, adding noise, and limiting the amount of data that gets sent from the device.” As Bindra notes, these techniques are in early development, and RTB House is looking forward to testing these solutions and working with Google to refine their ability. 

I wanted to highlight some of these innovative solutions that Google is working on to show that the future of the internet is looking very promising. I’m excited to test out these emerging technologies and find the best solutions that put consumer privacy at the forefront of online advertising while also delivering content that individuals care about.