Under the new program, Chrome will monitor your web browsing in order to sort you into various groups (or FloCs). “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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