Google Concludes FLoC Origin Trial, Does Not Intend to Share Feedback from Participants

Google quietly concluded its FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) origin trial this week. The trial was part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, a suite of new technologies designed to replace third-party cookies, fingerprinting, and other commonly-used tracking mechanisms. This particular experiment groups people together based on browsing habits and labels them using machine learning.

FLoC’s trial was scheduled to end Jul 13, 2021, and Google has decided to remove the project from the testing phase while analyzing feedback.

Amazon, GitHub, Firefox, Vivaldi, Drupal, Joomla, DuckDuckGo, and other major tech companies and open source projects have already opted to block FLoC by default.

Although these proposed changes to ad tech will impact the entire industry, as well as regular internet users, Google does not intend to disclose any of the private feedback the company received during FLoC’s origin trial.