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Err, what? So there would be one cohort of "new-parent-lives-in-springfield-works-in-power-plant-etc-etc" (combining multiple unrelated interests), it just has to have thousands of people in it?

Do cohorts allow advertisers to say, "Show this ad to anyone in a cohort with an affinity for 'new-parent' over threshold X?" is that so?

Do they let advertisers say, "here are the cohorts of our best 1000 customers, please show ads to anyone else in those cohorts?"

Would people in "my cohort" be the 1000-10000 people most like me in browsing habits in the world?

(Disclaimer, have tried to buy limited quantities of ads in the past, interested in some part as an advertiser)




> Would people in "my cohort" be the 1000-10000 people most like me in browsing habits in the world?

Yes: "a browser can group together people with similar browsing habits, so that ad tech companies can observe the habits of large groups instead of the activity of individuals. Ad targeting could then be partly based on what group the person falls into."

> there would be one cohort of "new-parent-lives-in-springfield-works-in-power-plant-etc-etc" (combining multiple unrelated interests), it just has to have thousands of people in it?

I mean, there aren't thousands of new parents who live in Springfield and work in a power plant? You would be in a cohort like "43A7".

> Do cohorts allow advertisers to say, "Show this ad to anyone in a cohort with an affinity for 'new-parent' over threshold X?" is that so?

Not really? An advertiser or (ad tech company) might learn, over time, that people in cohort "43A7" are very likely to be interested in baby clothes while people in cohort "5B7E" are more likely than average but not by that much. So they might be willing to bid more to show baby clothes to someone in 43A7 than in 5B7E, and not bid at all for most other cohorts. But the browser API just gives you an opaque cohort identifier.

> Do they let advertisers say, "here are the cohorts of our best 1000 customers, please show ads to anyone else in those cohorts?"

From my reading of the spec, that seems like it would work well.


Fascinating... Thank you for digging in on this!

Could a browser vendor send down a mapping of cohort hashes to interest vectors? I don't see anything in https://github.com/WICG/floc that suggests that couldn't happen, and it seems like it could greatly enhance utility without too much sacrifice to privacy. For example, it'd allow an advertiser to target all cohorts who like american football, I'd think.


I think this can be built on top of the proposed API? For example, a site about American football could publish/sell the cohort frequencies they observe.


Ah, that's interesting. Different from what I was talking about but certainly makes sense.




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