Google’s FLoC Promises a Radically Different Web

Default avatar.
March 04, 2021
Google’s FLoC Promises a Radically Different Web.

Advertising knows you better than your friends, better than your family, perhaps even better than your partner. Look up pizza recipes, and advertising will show you promotions for pizza ovens. Download a marathon training plan, and advertising will show you the latest running shoes. Buy a car, and advertising will show you adverts for other cars because no system’s perfect. Advertising does this with a simple trick: it watches you constantly. It’s watching you right now. The web is one giant machine for making money, and you’re the fuel. On the one hand, advertising’s insidious invasion of our privacy is enough to make you paranoid; on the other hand, I really love my pizza oven. The largest facilitator of advertising on the web is Google Ads — reportedly worth $134.8 billion per annum; it’s Alphabet Inc’s primary source of revenue. Last year, Google Ads announced that it would be ending its reliance on third-party cookies for delivering targeted advertising as part of a wider industry trend towards greater privacy protection for individuals. This week, we received more details confirming that Google Ads will not replace third-party cookies with comparable tracking technology. Google Ads intends to maintain relevant advertising, without user tracking, by anonymizing your identity within a crowd. The technical term is a Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), essentially Asimov’s Psychohistory, in capitalist form, some 45,000 years before Hari Seldon is due to be born. In simplistic terms, someone who buys a pair of running shoes can reasonably be expected to be interested in GPS watches. The complexity arises when grouping becomes more complex: people who watch Netflix on a Tuesday evening purchase a particular soup brand and read the Washington Post, for example. The system requires billions of groupings that are too complex to express in English. And yet Google claims to already be making some progress. As with any fledgling technology, the implications of its widespread adoption are unclear. FLoC is Chrome-based, so there’s the looming specter of a monopoly. Then there’s the issue of how groups are built; does Google need individual tracking to generate crowds of individuals? It’s unclear, but what is clear is that if Google succeeds — and it’s likely that it will — other networks will have no choice but to follow suit. It seems inevitable that there will be a wide-ranging impact across not just advertising but analytics and marketing as a whole. The back door that’s being held open is one-to-one relationships. If you visit a site, that site can attempt to entice you back with targeted advertising. This means the next few years will see a growth in the number of companies developing ongoing relationships in the form of newsletters and memberships. How ever it plays out, a fundamental change to the system that funds most of the web is certain to have a long-term impact on day-to-day user experience. Featured image via Pexels.

Ben Moss

Ben Moss is Senior Editor at WebdesignerDepot. He’s designed and coded work for award-winning startups, and global names including IBM, UBS, and the FBI. One of these days he’ll run a sub-4hr marathon. Say hi on Twitter.

Read Next

15 Best New Fonts, May 2023

The choices you make when selecting a typeface have more impact on your design than almost any other decision, so it’s …

10+ Best Tools & Resources for Web Designers and Agencies (2023 updated)

Having the ability to envision a tastefully designed website (i.e., the role creativity plays) is important. But being …

20 Best New Websites, May 2023

This month, there are tons of great new agency websites to get excited about. 3D animated prisms are a popular theme, a…

How to Find the Right White Label Website Builder for Your Agency

Web design agencies face a lot of obstacles in closing the deal with new clients. One of the most common ones is the ar…

Exciting New Tools For Designers, May 2023

There are hundreds of new tools for designers and developers released each month. We sift through them all to bring you…

3 Essential Design Trends, May 2023

All three of the website design trends here mimic something bigger going on in the tech space, from a desire to have mo…

10 Best AI Tools for Web Designers (2023)

It’s time to stop worrying if AI is going to take your job and instead start using AI to expand the services you can of…

10 Best Marketing Agency Websites (Examples, Inspo, and Templates!)

Marketers are skilled in developing strategies, producing visual assets, writing text with high impact, and optimizing …

15 Best New Fonts, April 2023

Fonts are a designer’s best friend. They add personality to our designs and enable fine typography to elevate the quali…

20 Best New Websites, April 2023

In April’s edition, there’s a whole heap of large-scale, and even full-screen, video. Drone footage is back with a veng…

Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2023

The AI revolution is having a huge impact on the types of products that are hitting the market, with almost every app b…

3 Essential Design Trends, March 2023

One thing that we often think about design trends is that they are probably good to make a list. That’s not always true…