GOOGLE's new TRACKING method is even WORSE - What FloC is, and what it means

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Google announced in early March that they would stop using third party cookies to track you across Google ads, and Chrome. It seems, on paper, like it's a good thing: after all, less tracking means less intrusion in our privacy, less data collected, and a more private web, right?

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Google will stop selling web ads targeted to your individual browsing habits. What they did previously was cross reference cookies that many websites had left on your device by integrating Google ads. By adding up all these cookies, they could have a very good picture of what pages you had browsed, what stuff you were interested in, and they targeted their ads based on this.

This can seem like a good thing, since you're seeing relevant ads, but what matters here is that this practice was never really disclosed, unless you were reading the privacy policies of all the websites you were browsing. This tracking happened without the user's knowledge, and all the various regulations that were put in place, like GDPR, only served to make it more confusing, with users routinely clicking "accept all cookies" to dismiss a huge pop-up window.

So this is gone, or it will be by 2022 if you're using Chrome. If you're using Firefox, or Safari, then you'll also be protected against these cookies that have the sole purpose of tracking you.

Google will still be able to collect your data through mobile applications though, on Android and iOS. Each app that uses the Google Ad Network will still collect and send data from that app to Google, and link it to your Google profile.

This new thing is called Floc, for Federated learning of Cohorts. Google bills it as a "privacy-first" and "interest based" ad technology. Using this new tech, Chrome will still track your browsing habits around the web, looking at what pages you read, and visited. Depending on what categories of pages you've read, how long you've spent on them, how often you came back, Google will place you into cohorts, basically groups of people centered around various interests.

For example, if you visit tons of Linux websites, yo ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GusN5EcrlCU