In August 2019, in a bid to replace third party cookies Google announced a new initiative to enhance privacy on the web – the Privacy Sandbox. The first implementation of which was the Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short. The technology grouped together people with similar browsing histories, then allowed advertisers to target those groups of people (the “cohorts”) without most of the personally-identifiable information that cookies usually provide. Although an improvement compared with third-party cookies, it has not proved popular with many privacy advocacy groups and companies.

