This year, Google announced its intention to end-user IDs for personalized advertising, replacing them with Federated Learning of Cohorts technology. Recently, developers from DuckDuckGo, Brave, Vivaldi, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have opposed the technology, and now the WordPress developers have joined them.
The FLoC technology itself uses machine learning algorithms in the process of analyzing user behavior on the Web. The peculiarity lies in the fact that the identification of individual users is not carried out in the process of analysis. Instead, they are divided into groups based on the similarity of their preferences. This allows data to be collected to a wider audience without compromising the privacy of individual users.
The aforementioned developers have previously spoken out negatively about Google’s new technology, believing that the tech giant is simply replacing one privacy risk with another. Now they have been joined by the WordPress developers, who also suggest treating FLoC as a security threat.
They posted a message stating, among other things, that on WordPress sites, the FLoC technology will be blocked automatically thanks to four lines of code that will send the browser a request to disable FLoC for a specific site. The developers also noted that WordPress site owners who want to use the new Google technology should remove the mentioned lines of code. This change will be included in WordPress 5.8, which is expected to be released this July. The developers also did not rule out adding automatic FLoC blocking to earlier versions of the CMS.