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DuckDuckGo has declared it’s blocking Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is taunted as a ‘privacy-preserving feature on its search engine.
Last year Google made a bold, sudden, and curious promise of not creating new expertise to exchange the third-party monitoring cookies it might quickly be banning from Chrome and, consequently, the Internet.
Whereas it advertises its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as an extra privacy-respecting manner for advertisers to assemble knowledge, DuckDuckGo calls shenanigans and takes steps to dam FLoC exercise even when you’re utilizing Google Chrome.
FLoC basically trades individual tracking for group tracking, placing individuals inside cohorts or groups that share similar browsing histories. It’s only the IDs of these cohorts made available to third parties, namely advertisers, for the purpose of ads directed towards those groups instead of single users.
Google promises that most (but not all) of the data and processing don’t leave users’ devices, and third parties will never be able to find out who’s who.
Not everyone is convinced that Google’s alternative to cookie technology is indeed more private. This has privacy lobby groups to advocate for the giant tech corporation to implement the controversial FLoC.
Google’s FLoC experiment is being enabled for a random number of Chrome users in the US, allegedly without their knowledge or consent.
DuckDuckGo, primarily renowned for its privacy-respecting web search and tools, is going beyond just calling out Google.
The search engine company is updating its products to block FLoC by default.
DuckDuckGo recommends users to seize using Chrome entirely, but that isn’t exactly an option for many people. In that case, it’s updating its Chrome web extension to block FLoC interactions in addition to tracking cookies.
Its search opts out of FLoC by default, regardless if you have the extension installed or not.
Praise for Google’s hard-line stance against tracking cookies has quickly turned into criticism over hits FLoC strategy.
In addition to doubts about this new technology’s actual privacy measures, there have also been accusations that Google is using its favorable position in the web browser market to give it an advantage in the advertising platform market since FLoC and its advertising benefits only work on Chrome anyway.
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