WordPress is 41% of the web. If this goes through and FLoC is disabled by default by WordPress, will FLoC be dead on arrival?
I wonder if AdWords will require use of floc headers
I don't know, but I guess they won't. Instead, you'll just get worse targeting on your site if your users don't send the headers. Which I think may also not be very popular with WordPress users, but I guess the proof will be in the pudding.
I've always been so interested in learning about the next best thing that I hadn't given Wordpress much thought.
Now, using it all the time, it's popularity is very understandable as an interface for people who are not technically savvy to maintain their own website.
I feel like the Wordpress community isn't the loudest, but it is certainly a force. I think, as a brand, this move definitely has me more excited about working with their software.
Glad to see WP taking a stand - I never knew that FLOC would be so bad. The WP proposal made it clear that it’s a discriminatory technology.
So if Googles find that too many people uses the header, they can just decide to ignore it from now on. Who is going to prevent them to do that ?
Someone please chime in if I'm wrong here. I'm no lawyer but do take these things seriously (I'm trying my best to provide a tracking-free website.)
It will take a few years but they're going to get hit very very hard by EU privacy regulators.
Mweh if it doesn’t break anything. But terrible if it breaks something.
This blows my mind every time. Even though I know it.
41.1% of websites
It looks like it’s based on the top ten million websites by traffic, but weighted equally. Maybe there are lots of low-traffic WordPress sites?
And many, many more high traffic websites. There's even some Facebook landing pages running WordPress and other many high profile sites[1].
that seems unlikely.
It appears that Google is trying to rewrite the rules of how browsers and the Web work, with the appearance of being on the side of privacy, but actually introducing an alternative method of surveillance that is going to be less favourable to almost everyone except Google. How many of the huge-audience sites are potentially going to lose out from that, not least because they rely on advertising themselves for the lion's share of their revenues?
This whole discussion started with a proposal from a platform that is supporting nearly half of the sites people are visiting. That puts WP in a unique and potentially very powerful position here as well, and evidently they're interested in trying to force the issue.
And finally, the SOPA experience has shown that it is not entirely implausible for large numbers of sites to collaborate in this way if they feel the threat is serious enough. So if FLoC is as bad as the critics are suggesting, it doesn't seem entirely out of the question. There seem to be quite a few powerful organisations that would have a variety of motivations for wanting to give Google a bloody nose over this one.
Why do you think Google hasn't prevented adblockers from running on it? If they did so, it would sink the browser so quickly.
You seriously underestimate the power of inertia.
By domains or by visits?
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management
Currently, for A/B testing, FLoC is automatically opting-in 0.5% of sites that serve ads, but that's only for a small testing population, the idea is that FLoC history contribution will be opt-in exclusively. (There's a proposal that you have to contribute to FLoC history calculations to get access to a user's FLoC identifier)
You send me a bunch of data, including headers, and I'm more or less free to do with that what I want within the privacy of my own browser. I don't have to listen to any of your headers if I don't want to.