If the battery of addressability alternatives becomes too confusing, will contextual advertising resurge? Kim Davis on February 8, 2021 at 3:39 pm More It’s common knowledge that Google Chrome will deprecate third-party cookies in the near future — likely in 2022. Possible alternatives to preserve addressability are being floated, among them initiatives springing from Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox. But are these alternatives, and the many others being proposed by adtech and data vendors, compelling to marketers? To make sense of Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC (and Fledge and Turtledove), we started with what the developers on GitHub’s Web Incubator Community Group are saying. A FLoC cohort is a large number of people grouped by the browser based on browsing history. “The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop a cohort based on the sites that an individual visits. The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors. The central idea is that these input features to the algorithm, including the web history, are kept local on the browser and are not uploaded elsewhere — the browser only exposes the generated cohort. The browser ensures that cohorts are well distributed, so that each represents thousands of people.”