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Mozilla, the developer consortium of the Firefox browser, has denounced the presence of several privacy problems in FLoC, Google's new Internet advertising tracking system that will replace the 'cookies' in its Chrome browser.

FLoC stands for Federated Cohort Learning, a system that Google has been testing since March among a limited number of users of its Chrome browser.

Its figure replaces that of the current third-party 'cookies' -which Chrome plans to block in 2022- and according to the company it seeks to keep targeted ads without affecting privacy.

Unlike 'cookies', FLoC indicators assign the user to a wide group of users with similar interests, so that advertisers do not access the complete history of each person.

Now, the Mozilla consortium has published this Thursday a detailed analysis of the privacy aspects of FLoC, in which they denounce several privacy problems of this system, and highlight that the FLoC cohorts can also be used to track the user.

Although cohorts or user groups can be made up of thousands of people, if advertisers have a series of additional information it may be possible to track individual people using FLoC or at least filter these groups, according to the authors of Firefox .

Among the FLoC-compatible techniques that can be used for Internet ad tracking is browser fingerprinting, which separates users based on which browser and operating system they use, or in which country they are.

Also, since FLoC indicators are periodically refreshed every about a week, it is possible that if a user visits the same site multiple times, the user may use several FLoC indicators with slightly different interests to distinguish individual users.

Mozilla has also highlighted that the FLoC identifiers "become a shared key to which advertisers can associate data from external sources", and that in this way "any site can know more about the user with less effort than they need today."

Google has proposed several mechanisms to solve these problems, but the consortium has described them as "insufficient".

The company sees it likely that FLoC is enabled by default, and although Google gives the option to disable this system for each site, Mozilla likely that many sites will not.

Google has also ensured that it will deactivate "sensitive" topics that assign users a FLoC indicator -for example, race, religion and sexual orientation-, that in these cases it will provide a blank cohort, and that it will not count sensitive websites in this technique.

Mozilla considers that "although these measures seem useful, they seem to be mainly improvements in the margins and do not address the basic problems", and also sees "very difficult that these defenses are carried out in practice".

These difficulties can occur either because the list of sensitive topics is incomplete, or because even if a site is not sensitive it is related to others that are, or because crawlers can access sensitive information despite the measures.

Mozilla is not the only rival to Google that has criticized the new FLoC system, and the DuckDuckGo search engine extension already blocks it for Chrome users who have been enabled, while WordPress has registered a proposal to allow blocking it for users. web administrators.

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