WordPress announces automatic disabling of Google FLoC on WordPress site

WordPress announced that it considers Google’s new FLoC tracking technology to be a security issue and plans to block it by default on the WordPress site.

With the emphasis on user privacy protection, more and more browsers have begun to block third-party cookies from advertisers. In response, Google introduced a new ad tracking technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). The working principle of FLoC is to group thousands of users with similar browsing history into a “user group (cohort)”. This “user group” is created by analyzing your web browsing history through machine learning on the device. The list of websites you visit will not be exposed, only the “user group ID” will be exposed and used for advertising.

However, many people later believed that Google’s FLoC solution just replaced one privacy risk with another. Therefore, DuckDuckGo updated its extension to prevent Google FLoC tracking, and Brave and Vivaldi also took measures to prevent Google FloC. In the latest announcement, WordPress stated that they believe Google’s FLoC technology is a security issue and will start to block it in future versions. The relevant code is as follows:

function disable_floc($headers) {

    $headers['Permissions-Policy'] = 'interest-cohort=()';

    return $headers;

  }

 

add_filter('wp_headers', 'disable_floc');

 

In addition, WordPress also stated that they may add a setting to allow users to control whether to allow FLoC. It believes that users who are not aware of this new tracking technology will automatically opt-in without fully understanding its content. Therefore, it is in the best interests of these users to automatically disable the technology.