On OSNews we just lately reported on how Google plans to take away help for third-party cookies. Many have seen this as providing a privateness enhance for customers, resulting in a greater Internet the place focused adverts primarily based on web-browser behaviour are a factor of the previous. The EFF takes a unique view.

Google is main the cost to interchange third-party cookies with a brand new suite of applied sciences to focus on adverts on the Internet. And a few of its proposals present that it hasn’t discovered the fitting classes from the continuing backlash to the surveillance enterprise mannequin. This publish will concentrate on a kind of proposals, Federated Studying of Cohorts (FLoC), which is probably probably the most bold—and probably probably the most dangerous.

FLoC is supposed to be a brand new solution to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: on this case, boiling down your current looking exercise right into a behavioral label, after which sharing it with web sites and advertisers. The know-how will keep away from the privateness dangers of third-party cookies, however it’s going to create new ones within the course of. It could additionally exacerbate lots of the worst non-privacy issues with behavioral adverts, together with discrimination and predatory concentrating on.