How to Disable FLOC in Google Chrome?

Chrome is not only the most popular of the Chromium-based browsers but, thanks to Google’s multiple operating environments on PCs and mobiles, it is the most used program worldwide within its category.

This is not bad news in itself, but the dependency that this generates can end up being counterproductive whenever the North American firm goes a bit out of line, as with the recent Federated Learning of Cohorts. Precisely for that reason, we want to tell you about them, and teach you how to disable FLoC in Chrome .

First of all, we must say that it all started at the beginning of last year, when The Big G announced its plans to end third-party cookies in Chrome, a long-standing problem. They also hinted that they planned to replace this tracking of user activity on the Internet with this new mechanism, FLoC.

This federated cohort learning , a type of web tracking through federated learning, was made known by Chetna Bindra, one of the top executives of the American company, who explained that the service met all Google’s privacy and transparency requirements, within the Privacy Sandbox platform .

A year and a half later, this FLoC method is already a palpable reality within the Google Chrome browser. One that, on the other hand, has caused enormous controversy among customers.

So how to disable FLoC in Google Chrome?

In principle, the latest versions of Chrome have a function that allows us to disable FLoC in the browser. Until now, the only opportunity that users had to be excluded from this tracking was to deactivate or delete third-party cookies . But, faced with this new scenario, we must learn other techniques.

Fortunately, the folks at gHacks bring us a tutorial that could be of enormous help in these cases. The most curious thing is that it is a setting that is not visible by default. You have to disable a ” flag ” to access it:

  • In the address bar of the latest version of Canary, type “chrome: // flags / # privacy-sandbox-settings-2”
  • The result that we care about will appear, «Privacy Sandbox Settings 2», which is the one that provides the solution
  • You have to disable it. For this, you must click on the Default option and choose Enabled
  • Then, restart the Chrome Canary browser for the change to impact
  • The next thing is to write “chrome: // settings / privacySandbox” in the URL

When you have completed all the previous steps that we just taught you, you will be closer to being able to control your privacy. Google points out, regarding its Federated Learning of Cohorts , that this trick allows you to deactivate FLoC for a period of one week, after which you must repeat the procedure. For now, it is possible to do this deactivation, although it is not clear whether, in the future, it will not be absolutely mandatory, without option.

 

How do you know if you are being “flocked”?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation -EFF- has created a website called Am I FLoCed? which, as we can assume, is intended to make it clear to us if we are being monitored by this new Chrome system. “Google is testing FLoC on Chrome users around the world. Find out if you are one of them », says the website.

Change browser, the only way out to avoid tracking

If you definitely do not want to be tracked by FLoC, another of the greetings, perhaps the only one, is to change the browser . You can try Edge , Microsoft’s browser that has improved a lot in its latest versions.

In any case, that does not mean that no one will be following your activity anymore. As Google itself duly stated, today websites depend on various technologies that allow them to offer ads to measure the performance of portals. That suggests they are hardly going to forgive us for this tracking.

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