Recently, an open-source Content Management System (CMS) WordPress has announced that it will block Google’s latest ad monitoring technology. The website creation platform views the new integrated technology as a security threat. The tech giant, Google is presently experimenting with a feature termed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).
The Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC employs an algorithm to see a user’s browser history and place the user in a group of people with similar browsing histories so that advertisers can target potentially interested users more easily. It has been known that this latest technology is more private than cookies, but it’s more complicated and has some possible privacy implications of its own if it is not performed in the right manner.
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“While it is indeed unusual to treat a new “feature” this way, there is precedent in that something that was not strictly a security vulnerability in comments was back-ported to previous versions for the good of the community as a whole,” WordPress announced in a blog post. FLoC will be a substitute for third-party cookies. The feature is yet to be fully rolled out. A number of browsers like Mozilla, Brave, Vivaldi, and DuckDuckGo have opted out of FLoC.
Meantime, WordPress has further published four lines of code that can assist the developers to block FLoC for their websites respectively. This move of WordPress could negatively impact Google’s plan significantly as WordPress controls more than 41 percent of the web.
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Besides, users who are in the favour of FLoC can opt for it themselves. WordPress variants that maintain privacy settings have the possibility of incorporating an on or off option to opt for FLoC. WordPress has further introduced a post by Electronic Frontier Foundation that described Google’s FLoC as a flop idea.
Source: The Verge
Image Source: WPpourlesnuls
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