Okay, yesterday we had reported on how Google had started to roll out a new user tracking system in place of the all-familiar 3rd party cookies.
Called FLoC for short, this will be 1st deployed in Google’s Chrome browser. But guess what? The Brave browser team has said it had disabled FLoC in its browser, & called FLoC “a step in the wrong direction”. It said on its official bog that “the new Google feature had your browser share your browsing behavior & interests by default with every Site & advertiser with which you interact.”
Brave said it opposed FLoC, along with any other feature designed to share information about browser users & their interests without their fully informed consent. To protect Brave users, Brave has removed FLoC in the Nightly version of both Brave for desktop & Android. The privacy-affecting aspects of FLoC have also not been enabled in Brave releases; the additional implementation details of FLoC will be removed from all Brave releases with this week’s stable release.
Brave said it was “disappointing” to see Google, instead of taking the present opportunity to help design & build a user-first, privacy-first Web, proposing & immediately shipping in Chrome a set of smaller, ad-tech-conserving changes which explicitly prioritize maintaining the structure of the Web advertising ecosystem as Google sees it. The Brave team claimed in the post that “FLoC materially harmed user privacy under the guise of being privacy-friendly.” It has cited 3 aspects of FLoC that were “particularly harmful & concerning.” Click here to catch up with them.
Image credit: Brave
