With Google's controversial positioning of the Chrome browser behind the FLoC, many users have wondered whether or not other browsers will partake. And if statements are anything to judge by, it seems that most of them will be sitting this one out.
Quite a mouthful of an opening premise, no? Well, allow us to break the terms down into more understandable chunks. As most users are probably aware, cookies record a lot of our online internet life. While initially their usage was more akin to that of websites managing visitor activity on their platform, keeping track of shopping carts and the like, but ever since the advent of online advertising kicked into gear, third party cookies have become an online nuisance. Harvesting user data in order to aim targeted ads towards users, their presence has been highly contested by users across the world. That's where Chrome's FLoC comes in.
The Federal Learning of Cohorts will be replacing third party cookies as a brand of advertising meant to cater to users without harvesting personal information, theoretically. Now while this seems perfectly harmless at first glance, controversy arose when individuals across the web accused Google of trying to establish a monopoly for online advertising, and that by forming cohorts, user search history could still fall prey to advertisers. This is especially irksome to these netizens since many other browsers such as Safari have simply blocked third party cookies outright without establishing any alternatives. If they could do so, what urges Google to establish a new platform for shady advertisers?
At any rate, even if Google is dedicating itself to the FLoC, many other browsers are not. Brave, Vivaldi, and DuckDuckGo have actively condemned the integration of the new cohort system, condemning it as the same privacy invasion in a separate guise. Larger browsers such as Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari have also not thrown their lot in with Google, at least for the nonce. Statements by the developers for each of these products have similar themes across them. To be specific, FLoCs have not been outright written off by these companies, but will certainly not be implemented anytime soon or without a incessant degree of thought dedicated to the manner.
Privacy is becoming more and more important to the general populace as time goes by. Much of this can be owed to a generally heightened sense of awareness of cybersecurity and how it can be exploited. Therefore, users choosing to hold Google accountable for such measures, even if their mettle has yet to be tested, is simply the demonstration of s healthy amount of reckoning for our online landscape.
Read next: Google Photos Introduces a Document Hub for You to Easily Find Your Documents
Quite a mouthful of an opening premise, no? Well, allow us to break the terms down into more understandable chunks. As most users are probably aware, cookies record a lot of our online internet life. While initially their usage was more akin to that of websites managing visitor activity on their platform, keeping track of shopping carts and the like, but ever since the advent of online advertising kicked into gear, third party cookies have become an online nuisance. Harvesting user data in order to aim targeted ads towards users, their presence has been highly contested by users across the world. That's where Chrome's FLoC comes in.
The Federal Learning of Cohorts will be replacing third party cookies as a brand of advertising meant to cater to users without harvesting personal information, theoretically. Now while this seems perfectly harmless at first glance, controversy arose when individuals across the web accused Google of trying to establish a monopoly for online advertising, and that by forming cohorts, user search history could still fall prey to advertisers. This is especially irksome to these netizens since many other browsers such as Safari have simply blocked third party cookies outright without establishing any alternatives. If they could do so, what urges Google to establish a new platform for shady advertisers?
At any rate, even if Google is dedicating itself to the FLoC, many other browsers are not. Brave, Vivaldi, and DuckDuckGo have actively condemned the integration of the new cohort system, condemning it as the same privacy invasion in a separate guise. Larger browsers such as Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari have also not thrown their lot in with Google, at least for the nonce. Statements by the developers for each of these products have similar themes across them. To be specific, FLoCs have not been outright written off by these companies, but will certainly not be implemented anytime soon or without a incessant degree of thought dedicated to the manner.
Privacy is becoming more and more important to the general populace as time goes by. Much of this can be owed to a generally heightened sense of awareness of cybersecurity and how it can be exploited. Therefore, users choosing to hold Google accountable for such measures, even if their mettle has yet to be tested, is simply the demonstration of s healthy amount of reckoning for our online landscape.
Read next: Google Photos Introduces a Document Hub for You to Easily Find Your Documents
