WordPress announces that it will treat Google's FLoC as a “security concern”, and will automatically disable the technology in its upcoming July release
WordPress announced today that they plan on treating Google's new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern and plans to block it by default on WordPress sites.
BleepingComputerLawrence Abrams
Context & Ripple Effects
WordPress’s move aligns with Brave’s earlier decision to disable FLoC, while Google had already acknowledged that FLoC testing faced potential GDPR incompatibility in Europe. A default at the publishing-platform layer matters because it turns a browser-level tracking dispute into a site-operator policy choice.
WordPress sites receiving the July release will block FLoC by default, limiting Google’s ability to gather FLoC data from those sites unless operators deliberately change the setting.
Google loses access to a large set of WordPress-managed pages at the platform default, while WordPress administrators receive a privacy-oriented configuration without having to implement it individually.
Second-order effects
Amazon’s later FLoC block compounds the loss of participating sites, making the cohort data available to Google’s advertising system less comprehensive across major web properties.
Publishers and browser vendors gain a precedent for classifying tracking mechanisms as security or privacy risks and disabling them through defaults rather than leaving the choice to end users.
Third-order effects
Google’s later replacement of FLoC with Topics shows how coordinated resistance from browsers, platforms, and large site operators can force redesigns of web-advertising proposals before they become broadly embedded.
If platform defaults continue to govern tracking participation, browser-ad technology will depend less on a single vendor’s rollout and more on adoption by the intermediaries that operate sites and user agents.
The trend: Web privacy governance is shifting toward platform-level defaults, allowing browsers, CMS providers, and major publishers to determine whether new advertising-tracking systems can reach scale.
If you care about privacy on the web, even if you don't use WordPress, I highly suggest supporting this effort to disable FLoC by default in WP Core and doing so as a security update. With 40% of the web this is sorely needed. https://make.wordpress.org/...
If you folks could actually stop giving the Chromium engine a go, that would be actually great. You give Google way too much power over the web to fuck us all over. https://twitter.com/...
It's unclear who in the Biden administration has their “finger on the pulse” of technical national security concerns like the #1 browser in the world creating a new side channel for tracking via FLoC that will auto-group user website visits together & save this into the browser..…
🚨 https://whitehouse.gov/, which runs on Wordpress, will potentially have an auto-block of Google's FloC after July ... But a HUGE portion of Current Biden Admin sites like https://fbi.gov/ + https://cia.gov/ + https://cisa.gov/ are auto-FloCing users...😨⛈️ https://twitter.com/..…
Interesting. Wordpress discussion of disabling FLoC by default, and shipping the change as a security fix to all supported versions https://make.wordpress.org/...
Every browser maker (except Google) and now Wordpress, which powers over 1/3 of the entire internet, are refusing to support Google's attempt to spy on people. We've come a long way from Google's original “don't be evil” motto. https://twitter.com/...
Shots fired: @WordPress to treat @google's #FLoC as a “security concern” and disable support by default. #privacy #advertising #AppTrackingTransparency https://make.wordpress.org/...
WordPress should absolutely do this. The project should be taking an Apple like stance on privacy when it comes to things like Google's FLoC tracking. https://twitter.com/...
To be clear, WordPress has not ‘announced’, or even yet agreed a plan to block Google's FLoC tracking technology. It's one user's suggestion. It appeals to many. But whether we should do it, and if so how, is under discussion. https://make.wordpress.org/...
Wow. WordPress proposing to add the empty Permissions-Policy header to disable Google's new FLoC tracking, and to do it as a security issue so that it's in an emergency release! 👏👏👏 https://make.wordpress.org/...
Don't be fooled: Google's latest announcement on third-party cookies doesn't mean it will stop tracking you. We've built a new site to tell you whether or not you are a test subject in Google's latest tracking experiment: https://amifloced.org/