FLoC, Google’s new advertising technology, isn’t just getting headwinds from Vivaldi and Brave. WordPress also sees it as a security risk and is taking steps.
Google will soon start rolling out FLoC, ‘Federated Learning of Cohorts’. Google’s alternative to individual tracking that groups people through the browser based on their interests.
But that is not to the liking of some. Last week, browsers Vivaldi and Brave, among others, announced that they would oppose FLoC. Now there is also WordPress, the platform on which 41 percent of all websites run.
WordPress says it considers FLoC to be a security issue and will therefore block it by default. This will happen from July, with WordPress version 5.8. The organization is considering extending the blocking to older versions via back-porting.
WordPress shares the four lines of code in its blog post it adds to block FLoC by default. It provides an HTTPS request header that tells the browser to disable FLoC.
That WordPress decides to refuse such a thing by default is remarkable. But the organization nuances that for those who want FLoC, it is easy to switch it back on. Simultaneously, the site fears that many website administrators are less aware of the impact and will not proactively turn off the identification technology themselves.
