The WordPress team will treat Google's new FLoC tracking technology as a security threat and block it by default on sites.
For some time now, browsers have been actively blocking third-party cookies used by marketing companies to display advertisements. In response, Google introduced a new tracking technology Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that categorizes users into anonymous categories based on their interests.
When Google began testing FLoC in the Chrome browser earlier this month , experts said the new technology was simply replacing old threats with new ones.
“FLoC is designed to be a new way of getting your browser to do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do — in this case, it converts your recent browser activity into a behavioral tag and then exchanges it with websites and advertisers. This technology will avoid the privacy threats posed by third-party cookies, but will create new ones in the process. It can also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy issues, including behavioral advertising, including discrimination and aggressive targeting, ” said Electronic Frontier Foundation officials .
Many browser and search engine makers like Brave Browser, DuckDuckGo and Vivaldi have removed FLoC from their software or created tools to block technology.
WordPress plans to disable FLoC with four lines of code, which will cause the content management system to issue an HTTP request header telling the browser to disable FLoC for the site.