Google announced last week that while other companies are planning to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers, Google will not. Google said “we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”

Google wrote:

Don’t worry, Google has special little robots that are almost as good as predicting user behavior or what users want to see without using cookies or other identifiers. It is called FLOC, Federated Learning of Cohorts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called FLOC a terrible idea and said there are major concerns with Google’s FLOC methodology and wrote:

At WebmasterWorld the admin said “I can’t see the war on tracking and profiling getting easier for anyone (users, advertisers, Google and other ad companies) in the short to medium term.” Very true.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.