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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I agree with Steve, FLOC is not inherently evil. If we can deprecate the existing tracking via cookies, FLOC will be an improvement.
Having said that, if my phone asks me for permission to be tracked by any app, I will definitely say no.
It is the lesser of two evils… But being the lesser of 2 evils doesn’t necessarily make it good.
If the solution isn’t opt-in, it isn’t a solution.
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I think FLOC will live or die based on how advertisers value its data. If they consistently pay more for more precise tracking, then FLOC wont gain any traction and the cold war between browsers and advertisers will continue.
Sadly, so far its been a battle that the privacy conscious user is losing.
My guess is that Google believes that killing ad tracking doesn’t really affect their bread and butter: search ads which rely solely on the terms you search for. In fact, I bet they’re thinking it makes AdWords more valuable.
In other words, goodbye AdSense and all the sites that rely on it, hello direct revenue from AdWords.
Even though I agree, I think that the majority of tracking is not done on the browser. It is done in mobile devices. If Apple starts blocking mobile tracking, google might be forced to adopt a similar approach in Android and that will literally kill tracking of billions of people.
You will then have only browser tracking to rely on.
I think that is why Google is trying to be ahead of the curve.
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