What is FLoC?

FLoC means Federated Learning of Cohorts API and is Google’s alternative to cookies on interest-based targeting. FLoC is part of the project The Privacy Sandbox, Google's initiative to eliminate cookies in Chrome until the year 2022.

FLoC is the Privacy Sandbox technology for interest-based advertising. FLoC hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser. Individuals are clustered into large groups of people with similar interests. Google thinks common interests can replace individual identifiers.

Google this month said advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising. The tests were done using in-market and affinity Google Audiences.

Google expects to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2, this year.