Am I FLoCed?
Google Chrome FLoC Trial: How to Identify You’re Being Tracked and Opt-Out of it
Cookies are out, and Google FLoC is in
Google Chrome has a new way to track you, in a method that the company called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. The company has claimed that it is a better way to give advertisers what they want and leave some semblance of privacy to users. However, privacy advocates have since spoken out against it, and especially its automated imposition of FLoC trials upon a randomised selection of users. What’s particularly surprising to note is how Google has begun its preparations without any clear disclosure of the same, and FLoC trials for 0.5% of all Chrome users are now active alongside standard cookie tracking as well.
Why its a threat to you
To understand, FLoC claims that it will no longer allow websites across the internet from tracking you by inserting scripts that trace what you do on the internet. While that sounds great, things aren’t particularly all that simple. With FLoC, Google is essentially bringing more control of how user activity is tracked under its umbrella while not exactly benefitting users as much as it would want everyone to believe. Practically, FLoC reads your browsing activity and history, checks in on all the sites you have visited, and classifies them into compartments or ‘cohorts’.
As Google claims in the FLoC whitepaper, it will “anonymise” a user’s identity but still group your activity with similar ones of others — therefore reading as much of what you do and who you are as what they do already. Google claims that FLoCs will also respect “sensitive” cohorts by not sharing that piece of information with advertisers — such as a user searching for a medical condition or a specific aspect of their race. However, this information reviewed by Google is sensitive with its metric, and it does not leave the ability to deduce what’s sensitive and what’s not to users. Bodies such as EFF have raised this, among other points, defining how invasive and unbalanced FLoC is.
What you can do to protect yourself
To find out if Google Chrome has silently activated FLoC on your account, head to the EFF’s FLoC tracking site, which will tell you if Google has started the new tracking step for you or not. While Google claims that it will, in future, enable superior privacy sandbox controls built directly into Chrome, such controls are still not available — even in beta builds of Chrome.
If your account enabled with FloC, you could choose to use a more privacy-centric web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox. If you’re a Chrome enthusiast and want to continue using it, recommend installing the privacy first search engine DuckDuckGo’s FLoC browser plugin that automatically detects Google’s behavioural tracking and prevents it from tracking your online activities.
Also, test your browser to ensure the settings are precise to avoid tracking and fingerprinting your online activities. To block third-party trackers using cookies, fingerprinting, and other sneaky methods, install EFF’s browser extension, Privacy Badger, that supports leading web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge & Opera.
Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared.
Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the internet — Gary Kovacs.
