We’ve reached out to Opera for comment as well, and here’s that company’s statement:Īs you probably know, Opera has a long history of introducing privacy features that benefit our users: it was the first major browser to introduce built-in ad blocking, browser VPN and other privacy-centric features. It does not protect privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google.” No browser vendor except Chrome is joining the FLoCĪnyway, here’s Brave: “The worst aspect of FLoC is that it materially harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.” And here’s Vivaldi: “We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented. It’s a complicated technology that does appear to keep you semi-anonymous, but there are enough details to hide dozens of devils. If implemented badly, FLoC could leak out sensitive information. One note I’ll drop here is that I am relieved that nobody else is implementing FLoC right away, because the way FLoC is constructed puts a very big responsibility on a browser maker. I am not aware of any Chromium-based browser outside of Google’s own that will implement it and very aware of many that will refuse. Google Chrome is built on an open source project, and so FLoC was implemented as part of that project that other browsers could include. It’s more private than cookies, but it’s also complicated and has some potential privacy implications of its own if it’s not implemented right. It uses an algorithm to look at your browser history and place you in a group of people with similar browsing histories so that advertisers can target you. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web.Ī couple of weeks ago, Google announced it was beginning to test a new ad technology inside Google Chrome called the Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies.

Chrome vs safari vs firefox vs opera