I’m sure there has to be a better way to introduce the audience to FLoC. I’m over five paragraphs in and the article hasn’t properly articulated what is FLoC and _why_ it is bad. Just that it is bad.
Per the linked article, the browser is filling in the blanks "___N_" as you visit each website, but it's telling each website not _what_ site you visited, but that you are in the groups of "FAA_G" vs. "FAANG".
The browser manufacturer is effectively seeing every user for what they are (all the letters of the alphabet, as it were), and each site is only seeing a hash/digest/cohort/group, but those group segregations are not coming from particular "networks of websites", but instead from the browser itself.
The end result is that you can't trust the browser b/c it might be (ed: it is!) spying on you.
Google started removing the URL bar and replacing it with the omni-box. Instead of https://google.com/ => ?q=guitar, you would simply type "guitar" into the URL bar.
The lesson here is to reduce the number of intermediaries between you and your customer. Own the hardware, the screen, the operating system, the network, _everything_ between your CPU's and the user's eyeballs. (or in amazon's case, the manufacturer, the boxes, the website, the shipper, the TV, etc.). (or in netflix's case, the content, the edge-cache storage tank, the TV, the remote control, the pixels, etc.)