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'The FLoC origin trial is an early but important step toward the Privacy Sandbox's goal of an open web that is both private by default and economically sustainable.' 'We strongly believe that FLoC is better for user privacy compared to the individual cross-site tracking that is prevalent today,' a Google spokesperson told Consumer Reports. Other companies may not be able to charge as much for their advertising services because Google has more valuable information. When third-party cookies are replaced by FLoC, Google will have a way to track consumers that isn’t available to other companies, which could give it a steep advantage in the advertising business. “Getting rid of them is good, but replacing them with technologies that end up with much of the same unwanted tracking isn't really solving the problem.”įLoC could also introduce anti-trust concerns.

“Third-party cookies were an accidental artifact of the web that was exploited in bad faith to track users for decades,” says Justin Brookman, direct of privacy and technology policy at Consumer Reports. The company says it won’t learn anything about your specific browsing behavior, but it will have enough information to help companies target you with ads. It will send information identifying your FLoC back to Google, and websites will be able to check which FLoC you're in. Under the new program, Chrome will monitor your web browsing in order to sort you into various groups (or FloCs).

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“Overall, we felt that blocking third-party cookies outright without viable alternatives for the ecosystem was irresponsible, and even harmful, to the free and open web we all enjoy,” Marshall Vale, Google’s Privacy Sandbox product manager, wrote in a blog post. FLoC is part of a suite of changes Google calls the Privacy Sandbox, which the company says will strike a balance between privacy and advertising needs. You may get further protections from such tracking as lawmakers and regulators pay more attention to personal data rights.īut the decline of third-party cookies presents a problem for Google and other companies that rely on consumer data to make money on targeted ads.

That’s not always bad cookies are used to make essential features work, such as keeping you logged in to an account or remembering the items you’ve added to a shopping cart.īut many sites use cookies operated by other companies, or third parties, for purposes such as targeted advertising.īrowsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari already include settings to let you block third-party cookies. Many websites use cookies to track your behavior. DuckDuckGo says its browser extension will prevent the technology from working.Ĭonsumers also have other tools to avoid the tracking, and a simple one lets you check to see if FLoC is active on your browser. Google announced that FLoC had already been rolled out to some Chrome users, reportedly numbering in the millions, in advance of a wider rollout sometime in the next two years. “It does behavioral tracking by default, and there is no such thing as a behavioral tracking mechanism imposed without consent that respects people’s privacy.” 'FLoC is simply not good for privacy,” Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, said in statement. The company's already dominant tracking and advertising business could become even more powerful. And the change seems likely to consolidate more data in Google's hands, hamstringing competitors.

Google will continue tracking consumers, albeit in a slightly more anonymous way. On one hand, privacy advocates welcome the end of third-party cookies because it stops one of the main ways consumers are monitored by a wide variety of companies.īut they argue that the move eliminates one privacy problem by introducing another.

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