Hello, welcome to the Thursday, April 29, 2021 edition of the Sandcent Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Let's start today by talking a little bit about a feature that I have been mentioning in the past, but in the last couple of weeks, it has gotten a lot more

attention, and that is Flock or the Federated Learning of Cohorts. This is a feature that

Google is proposing in order to track users, and it's supposed to replace somewhat what Google is currently doing

with cookies and other methods.

And in Google's words, it's sort of supposed to balance the privacy of users as well as Google's

need to send you advertisements.

What flock really means is that your browser will use the last seven days of your browsing

history to calculate a 16-bit number, so that's 65,335 different identifiers that can be used to essentially assign you to a group of users.

The way this works is that each website is sort of assigned a category and then the sum of these categories essentially makes up this identifier.

Google's justification here is that first of all, they will not include any sensitive

sites like health information and such in that identifier.

And by only having 65,000 different identifiers, there is no one-to-one link to a particular

user, but each identifier will have thousands of users that share this particular identifier.

But of course, it's still tracking and it's not really transparent to the user, so there has been a lot of pushback against this feature.

Most notably, Microsoft decided not to include it in Microsoft Edge,

which of course is derived from Google Chrome,

and websites are starting to opt out of this feature.

If you would like to opt out of this feature.

If you would like to opt out of this feature with your website, basically meaning that your

website will not be included in this hash, then you have to set a permissions policy header.

This is a relatively new header.

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