What is 'FLoC', a new advertising mechanism without third-party cookies proposed by Google?

Google has announced that it will abolish Chrome's third-party cookie support by 2022 , but has announced a new advertising API, FLoC , to replace it. FLoC can perform as well as existing ad targeting .

Building a privacy-first future for web advertising
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/2021-01-privacy-sandbox/

Chromium Blog: Privacy Sandbox in 2021: Testing a more private web
https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/privacy-sandbox-in-2021.html

In Internet advertising, a method called 'behavioral targeting' is generally used to display advertisements in a manner that matches the user's tastes and interests. Behavioral targeting is known to lead to purchases and has extremely high performance. Third-party cookies are used for this behavioral targeting.

However, it has been pointed out that third-party cookies that track user behavior after leaving a website violate individual privacy, and Apple has quickly banned third-party cookies in browsers .

Google has also announced that it will abolish support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022, and a ' Privacy Sandbox' was proposed to create a new advertising mechanism. You can read what has been discussed so far in the privacy sandbox below.

What kind of 'cookieless advertising system' is Google trying to create? |GIGAZINE.BIZ

Until now, it has been pointed out that the privacy sandbox is 'a conceptual content and does not show how actual advertising operations and revenue will change', but on January 25, 2021, Google officially announced On the blog, we announced an API called ' FloC ' with performance comparable to third-party cookies.

FloC is an abbreviation for Federated Learning of Cohorts, which uses machine learning algorithms to analyze data of users visiting websites and create cohorts of thousands of users. The API is used as a Chrome extension, personal data collected is not shared, and targeting is based on cohort analysis data. According to Google's test, targeting using FLoC was able to achieve at least 95% performance of cookie-based advertising.

Along with Floc, Google also announced a new proposal called ' Fledge ', which evolved from ' turtledove '. Fledge is a proposal to incorporate a 'trusted server' into turtledove, which completes ad bidding on the browser. Fledge testing with several ad tech companies is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2021.

Internet advertising consists of a balance between 'advertisers can earn money' and 'user privacy protection', but Apple's policy change was drastic focusing on the latter. On the other hand, Internet media AXIOS believes that Google is trying to take a more gradual and collaborative approach to stakeholders while making changes to privacy protection.