Yes, Vivaldi Will Disable FLoC Too
- Paul Thurrott
- Apr 14, 2021
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19
Not to be outdone by DuckDuckGo and Brave, alternative browser maker Vivaldi has announced that it, too, will block Google FLoC user tracking.
“Google’s new data harvesting venture is nasty,” Vivaldi founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner writes. “Called FLoC (The Federated Learning of Cohorts), this new advertising technology intends to replace third-party cookies and related technologies like third-party localStorage. This clearly is a dangerous step that harms user privacy.”
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Vivaldi notes that while it, like Brave, uses Google’s Chromium as the underpinnings of its own browser, it is free to do its own thing when it comes to FLoC. And Vivaldi, unlike Google, stands up for the privacy rights of its users and does not approve of tracking and profiling, “in any disguise.” As a result, Vivaldi will also block Google’s FLoC.
“Our privacy policy is simple and clear; we do not want to track you,” Mr. Tetzchner explains. “The FLoC experiment does not work in Vivaldi. It relies on some hidden settings that are not enabled in Vivaldi … we modify the Chromium engine in many ways to keep the good parts but to make it safe for users; we do not allow Vivaldi to make that sort of call to Google.”
Vivaldi pledges to disable FLoC, no matter how it is implemented going forward. And this line pretty much sums it all up:
“[FLoC] does not protect privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google,” Tetzchner says. Exactly.