Google’s New Advertising Tracking Experiment Criticised By Industry Experts

Although Google vowed to opt-out of third-party cookies used by advertisers for online tracking in order to improve the privacy experience of users. However, the company’s “Federal Cohort Learning” (FLoC) alternative has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and industry insiders. As a new technology introduced in the Chrome browser, it claims to be able to increase the anonymity of users while still collecting user browsing data for the purpose of advertising.

Google announced at the time that it would first start a limited trial run of FLoC, but did not provide users with a direct way to opt-out. In addition to the angry criticism from EFF, the privacy advocacy organization also bluntly stated that FLoC is a terrible idea, and proposed that Google withdraw the project as soon as possible.

According to previous statements, Google has opened FLoC pilots for 0.5% of users in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and the Philippines. In order to help everyone understand whether they have been involved in the FLoC experiment more intuitively, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also timely produced and launched the warning page as shown below.

At the same time, DuckDuckGo, which focuses on privacy experience, also earlier launched a Chrome extension designed to prevent Google FLoC tracking.