Google Launches New Tracker to Save Your Browsing History

Google, one of the leading companies in the online ad industry, is working on revamping the way things work. The search engine giant will join Safari and Firefox in blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser.
Unlike Safari and Firefox, which have already started blocking them by default, Google will take a phased approach and will slowly start instituting a new set of technical solutions that it has devised. The company has come up with a new system called FLOC (A Federated Learning Of Cohorts) that will enable “interest-based advertising on the web” without letting advertisers know your identity.

According to Google, FLOC will work on making its users semi-anonymous by associating them with a “cohort,” a group of users sufficiently large enough to make users invisible to the companies targeting them.

The Chrome browser will use algorithms to create cohorts depending on certain qualities and interests. Each user’s individual browsing history will be kept private and never shared with anybody, but the browser itself will look at the history and then assign a user to one of those cohorts.

Hence, rather than advertisers collect your browsing history to build an individual profile of you on their servers, Google will do it for them and have the browser serve a list of user interests to advertisers whenever they ask via an API so that the users will get relevant ads.

However, many believe that the whole system is based on a ‘false premise’ and it is just a way for Google to show its domination and take things into its hands.