AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-led Initiatives

The Chrome Dev Summit concluded earlier this week. Announcements and discussions on hot topics impacting the greater web community at the event included Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, improvements to Core Web Vitals and performance tools, and new APIs for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).   Paul Kinlan, Lead for Chrome Developer Relations, highlighted the latest product updates on the Chromium blog, what he …

Google Concludes FLoC Origin Trial, Does Not Intend to Share Feedback from Participants

Google quietly concluded its FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) origin trial this week. The trial was part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, a suite of new technologies designed to replace third-party cookies, fingerprinting, and other commonly-used tracking mechanisms. This particular experiment groups people together based on browsing habits and labels them using machine learning. FLoC’s trial was scheduled to end …

Chrome Canary Adds Flag for Disabling FLoC Testing

Google’s controversial Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) experiment now has a feature flag within Chrome Canary (the nightly build of Chrome for developers) that allows users to opt out. In January 2020, Google announced its plans to discontinue support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. The first bits and pieces of the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative started landing …

Joomla Blocks FLoC by Default, Drupal Moves to Block FLoC in Upcoming 9.2 Release

Joomla has announced plans to block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) by default going forward. The 3.9.2.7 security update, released yesterday, added a Permissions Policy header to disable FLoC. Users can now find a new setting in Global configuration on the Site tab in the Site Settings area, where they can toggle FLoC on if desired. This change will …