FLoC Fears
There’s no love lost for FLoC. In a blog post on Sunday entitled “Proposal: Treat FLoC As A Security Concern,” a WordPress developer called Carike suggested that users of the open source content management software block FLoC by default. If that happens, it would be a big deal. WordPress powers roughly 41% of sites on the web. Because of its vast scale, the blogger contends that the WordPress community “can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code.” There’s been a growing backlash against Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts API based on the fear that it could facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, “as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation made a similar argument in early March, claiming that FLoCs are both “the most ambitious – and potentially the most harmful” of the propo