Several Chromium Browsers Reject Google's Profiling

Google: advertising uber alles. Vivaldi, Brave, DuckDuckGo reject Google's FLoC ad tracking tech

Firefox, not being Chromium-based, is not impacted. Neither is Pale Moon (that's a browser) and any other geko or goanna based browsers.

FLoC, which is the unfortunate acronym Federater Learning of Cohorts, is Google's current brainstorm for tracking your every move about internet for the purposes of treating you differently based on what you have done over the past week. See the link to the EFF below for more information.

Both Brave and DuckDuckGo are completely focused on privcay, so it isn't surprising that they rejected it. I can't decide if it is surprising that the Opera browser hasn't joined them. (Opera is in many ways, as invasive as Google's Chrome, just not Google.)

"At Vivaldi, we stand up for the privacy rights of our users. We do not approve tracking and profiling, in any disguise. We certainly would not allow our products to build up local tracking profiles," says Jon von Tetzchner, Vivaldi CEO and co-founder.

"To us, the word 'privacy' means actual privacy. We do not twist it into being the opposite. We do not even observe how you use our products. Our privacy policy is simple and clear; we do not want to track you," von Tetzchner further stated in a blog post released this week. [SNIP]

Brave calls FLoC "a step in the wrong direction," and considers FLoC to be harmful to user privacy under the guise of being "privacy-friendly."

You can find the Electronic Frontier Foundation's take at the following link: Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea.

The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement.

No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web; phasing out tracking cookies and other persistent third-party identifiers is long overdue. However, as the foundations shift beneath the advertising industry, its biggest players are determined to land on their feet.

And one last thing... if you are Chrome user and determined to stay a Chrome user, you might want to see if you've been FLoCed. See this link: Am I FLoCed?