CDL-11/19 - What the FLoC?
Channel: UCYBR - UMBC Center for Cybersecurity
Date: 2021-11-21

Abstract:

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is a proposed web tracking mechanism from Google, and part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative to deprecate 3rd-party cookies. Instead of cookies, FLoC places a user’s interests into a “cohort.” The cohort acts as an identification label that is sent to a web server. The server uses the cohort (a label) to return targeted advertisements. Privacy concerns with FloC abound. If the number of users in a cohort is too small, specific persons could be identified. If the number of cohorts is too large, a targeted group could be identified. Retribution towards specific persons or types of people may be possible. Thus, there are concerns for people in politically oppressed countries, advocating prejudicial bias, and other possible privacy concerns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) states “FLoC is a terrible idea” [1]. Several browser manufactures have refuted FLoC [2]. Today’s presentation will review 3rd-party cookies, and introduce FLoC and SimHash to estimate set similarity. The underlying privacy concerns is the driving focus of the presentation

[1] Bennett Cyphers, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea,” March 3, 2021.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea

[2] Dieter Bohn, The Verge, “Nobody is flying to FLoC – Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, and Mozilla are all out,” April 16, 2021.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387492/google-floc-ad-tech-privacy-browsers-brave-vivaldi-edge-mozilla-chrome-safari

About the Speaker:

Dr. Michael Oehler is a career civilian, a Ph.D. graduate from UMBC’s Cyber Defense Laboratory (CDL), and a cybersecurity expert. His career spans three decades and his roles as varied as a threat reporter, technical director for endpoint security, and visiting professor to the US Naval Academy. His interests include applied cryptography, security protocols, operating system security, and pinball. Email: oehler@gmail.com