Google will end the trial with Federated Learning of Cohorts of FLoC on July 14 and has no plans to extend it. The company first wants to process the feedback on the initiative before starting a new test. That feedback will not be publicly available.
It was already known that the Federated Learning of Cohorts test would end on July 14, but given the fuss about the technology, it was questionable whether Google would extend it to gain more insights. That is not the case, clarifies Google developer Josh Karlin to a question about this.
The test started in March and covered Chrome 89 through 91, so it’s been disabled in version 92. “We’ve decided not to renew the Origin Trial. Instead, we’re working hard to improve FLoC to handle the feedback that we received from the community before we proceed with the testing of the ecosystem,” said Karlin.
At a meeting of the Web Commerce Interest Group this week on a related part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, Google employee Michael Kleber made it clear that non-public FLoC feedback is not shared with the outside world. According to Kleber, the core of the feedback will be derived from a next version of FLoC, as noted by The Register from the minutes of the meeting. FLoC should become a widely accepted part of the post-third-party cookie world, so reported Google early this year.
There is already a lot of public feedback on the initiative, and that largely consists of criticism. FLoC is part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, a collection of techniques that Google proposes that, according to the company, better guarantee privacy. The API for FLoC should replace tracking cookies and still give advertisers some opportunity to target advertising, based on groups. Such a group or cohort is based on the internet behavior of users.
The idea is that users can no longer be followed individually, but only anonymously as part of a group. Critics such as Mozilla argue that fingerprinting is still possible and would become even easier. In addition, critics argue that Google is imposing the technology, partly due to the power that the company has in the advertising and browser market. Many organizations have therefore announced that they do not support FLoC, including browser builders and parties such as WordPress, Drupal and Symfony. Google recently postponed its plan to phase out tracking cookies from the end of 2021 to 2023.