ads-privacy

Is there an API that allows me to see, unpack, and set my own cohort? The FloC explainer [0] suggests the basic API just returns a stable hash [0]. I am curious about the space of cohorts. Also, whether there'd be an advantage to choosing a cohort for my task, vs just being anonymous. EDIT: that would appear to be TURTLEDOVE [1] [0] https://github.com/WICG/floc [1] https://github.com/WICG/turtledove The FloC announcement is https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/2021-01-privacy-sa... The whitepaper explains the approach: https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...

Yep - without having read the article due to paywall, they're likely referring to FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/... https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-fir... Make no mistake - as far as I can tell, this preserves Google's ability to track that you are, say, a new parent because you've searched for baby clothes. What it won't know is which new parent you are. The system is designed to give probabilistic assurances of k-anonymity. But Google will no doubt tune those "cohort" memberships, and the value of "k," to capture the vast majority of current advertiser needs, while still being able to communicate to antitrust inquiries and the public that they are not giving people unique identifiers. If anything, it hurts their competition more than it would hur

This is probably related to the "ban" of third party cookies [1] and most likely they just found a way without using cookies but other technologies - most likely biometric features + Chrome data in case you're using Chrome [1] https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-third-party-cookies/ Edit: I did not have time to read it, but here is the paper and probably something like the algorithm they want to use: https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...

There are various proposals they are working under the umbrella of the Privacy Sandbox project, couple of key ones here: https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/tree/master/proposals/... https://github.com/WICG/turtledove