Written by Shoshana Wodinsky on Gizmodo.
“Digiday reported this week that some major players in the adtech industry have started drawing up plans to turn FLoC into something just as invasive as the cookies it’s supposed to quash. In some cases, this means companies amalgamating any data scraps they can get from Google with their own catalogs of user info, turning FLoC from an ”anonymous” identifier into just another piece of personal data for shady companies to compile. Others have begun pitching FLoC as a great tool for fingerprinting—an especially underhanded tracking technique that can keep pinpointing you no matter how many times you go incognito or flush your cache.
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[W]hat if that guy regularly visits websites centered around queer or trans topics? What if he’s trying to get access to food stamps online? This kind of web browsing—just like all web browsing—gets slurped into FLoC’s algorithm, potentially tipping off countless obscure adtech operators about a person’s sexuality or financial situation. And because the world of data sharing is still a (mostly) lawless wasteland in spite of lawmaker’s best intentions, there’s not much stopping a DSP from passing off that data to the highest bidder.”
Read ‘Google’s Quest to Kill the Cookie Is Creating a Privacy Shitshow’ on the Gizmodo site.