Google has decided to retire the third-party cookies , which are the cornerstone of targeted advertising (and not only) on the web. The alternative solution? Among the BigG proposals there are the FLoC . We talked about it in this article: in short, it is a question of classifying users within groups of individuals with similar interests, without tracing the individual but rather the whole. The idea certainly seems more privacy-friendly than the current third-party cookies, but the concerns about it are already many.
Brave, Vivaldi, and DuckDuckGo have already professed their opposition, even calling Google's initiative “privacy-invasive”, which in theory would like to be precisely the contrary. The main reason (but the question is very complex) is that with the FLoC much more data would circulate, even from and on sites not interested in advertising, making the user more exposed; furthermore, categorizing users into groups could also be discriminatory in certain cases. And finally, this technology would be less “regulated” and therefore less protected users. However, you can read more about the individual positions of the three companies in their respective links on their name.
Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera have been more vague at the moment, stating that for now they do not have FLoC technology support plans. This does not exclude that they can implement it in the future. The Verge has a good collection of statements on the subject, but the gist is that everyone seems to be waiting to understand where the market will go, and given the “power” of Google it is possible that in the end they will follow it, but in any case not obvious, at least for now.
In all this fits WordPress , easily defined as the most popular CMS in the world (40% of the web would be based on him), or “the skeleton” on which many websites rely . Well, even WordPress is skeptical, to the point that it could offer a simple option to enable FLoCs, leaving them disabled by default.
In short, the road to Google's new initiative seems all uphill, but the last word is certainly not said, and as we have already pointed out, changes in direction are more than possible in the near future.
