. The race is on to find an alternative technology to replace the third-party tracking cookies advertisers use to target and measure online ads. Google, owner of the world's most popular web browser, set the countdown clock ticking last year when it said it would end support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. It's been experimenting with tools in its "Privacy Sandbox" that are designed to allow advertising to continue to work on the web but in a less privacy encroaching way. Last month, Google said one of those new techniques — Federated Learning of Cohorts (also known as FLoC) — was "nearly as effective as cookie-based approaches" in its own tests. FLoC uses machine learning algorithms that run on a user's device to cluster people into interest-based groups based on behavior like their browsing history. It's now preparing to let other adtech companies experiment with some of its proposals.