FLoC: Drupal Opts Out!

Nisha Oommen

Drupal 9.2 Disables FLoC by Default

The recent move by Google to introduce Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) has kicked up a major storm among government technology watchers and privacy rights groups. The intent here is to segregate people into groups or ‘cohorts’ depending on their interests. Their interest is of course gathered from their browsing history.

The implications are huge and are not fully understood! Drupal Association has announced that FLoC is blocked in its release version 9.2.

Google claims they won’t be naming these groups but they will have only IDs. Google is on the path to disable cookies. Another interesting move by Google is to not test this in the European Union because of their General Data Protection Regulation( GDPR).

Content personalization is done usually by inferring individual interests based on the browsing history of individuals for websites- on their platform. This includes time spent, repetition of access, ‘You May Also Like’ -hits and misses. This is done by cookies that are placed which tracks the user journey on the site. These are for the website owners. In the case of Google, the information gathered is huge considering that most people use Google Chrome as their default browser.

API’s are level grounds that give some access to information about individuals general browsing history and therefore their interest to any site that opts for it. But on the contrary cookies and other tracking techniques like device fingerprinting can be used to gather individual browsing behavior across many sites.

A person’s PII( Personally Identifiable Information) like their email id they use to sign in can be used to trace and match individuals to their browsing history. This is where the danger lies while using third party cookies. This information can be traded for ill gotten gains where web ethics are not there.

One way Google can mitigate this problem is by ensuring these cohort sizes are large enough to avoid victimizing individuals from these data.

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