Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

If this actually goes anywhere, I'm kind of excited about it from the perspective of a product developer.

Being able to do content recommendation for fresh visitors without any tracking effort of your own would be pretty cool. It will probably come with a dialog, so users will likely opt out often for ads or on page load, but not if they just clicked "show me movie recommendations" in your app.

> It will probably come with a dialog

Oh Christ I hope not. Any replacement for the current setup has to get rid of that blight. Should be a single opt in/out decision when you start using the browser.

Won't work.

The proposed designs never expose segments (err, cohorts, whatever) to the page. This machine works for managing targeted advertising in Chrome, and... that's it.

The OP says:

> The draft specification states that a user’s cohort ID will be available via Javascript, but it’s unclear whether there will be any restrictions on who can access it, or whether the ID will be shared in any other ways.

Is this incorrect?

No, they explicitly do.

> cohort = await document.interestCohort()

I mean it‘s a proposal. I‘ll believe it when I can use it, but maybe actually look at the proposal.

It would be a browser level dialog, so good browsers can give you that option, like safari does for other permissions.

Oh yeah, sorry, I should have clarified: there are a LOT of followup documents that build on it. The reason I think it won't be an option comes from one of those. (I think FLEDGE, but don't have time to check.)

But like you said, we'll see what they actually ship.

Oh that‘s disapointing, if not surprising. Thanks for the clarification. It seems strange that they are willing to give such a boost to small competitors.