Security News > 2021 > April > What the FLoC? Browser makers queue up to decry Google's latest ad-targeting initiative as invasive tracking

Google's FLoC mechanism for ad personalisation, currently being trialled in the Chrome browser, has been rejected as privacy-invasive tracking by other browser makers including Vivaldi and Brave.

FLoC is part of what Google calls the Privacy Sandbox initiative, a proposal to "Support business models that fund the open web in the absence of tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies," according to now-retired Chrome engineering director Justin Schuh and product manager Marshall Vale in January.

Google runs a FLoC service that defines the cohorts and sends data to the browser.

"You might visit a website that relates to a highly personal subject that may or may not use FLoC ads, and now every other site that you visit gets told your FLoC ID, which shows that you have visited that specific kind of site," he said.

Two days ago, Brave CEO Brendan Eich and senior privacy researcher Peter Snyder also voiced their objection to FLoC. "Brave has removed FLoC in the Nightly version of both Brave for desktop and Android. The privacy-affecting aspects of FLoC have never been enabled in Brave releases; the additional implementation details of FLoC will be removed from all Brave releases with this week's stable release," they said.

Yesterday Google mathematician Michael Kleber, on the Chrome team, claimed that "FLoC is not useful for tracking. There are thousands of people with the same FLoC, so someone trying to use it to track you would end up seeing a huge amount of not-you mixed in with a very small amount of you."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/04/14/browser_makers_reject_google_floc/