WordPress May Automatically Disable Google FLoC On Websites

WordPress announced today that they are treating Google’s new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern and may block it by default on WordPress sites. After Google began testing FLoC this month in Google Chrome, there has been a consensus among privacy advocates that Google’s FLoC implementation just replaces one privacy risk with another one.

Other privacy browser and search engine developers, such as Brave Browser, DuckDuckGo, and Vivaldi, have all removed FLoC from their software or created tools to block it.

WordPress plans to disable FLoC using the following four lines of code, which will cause the blogging platform to issue a HTTP request header tells the browser that FLoC should be disabled for the site.

function disable_floc($headers) {
    $headers['Permissions-Policy'] = 'interest-cohort=()';
    return $headers;
  }
 
add_filter('wp_headers', 'disable_floc');

WordPress states that this block is planned for WordPress 5.8, scheduled for release in July 2021, but is requesting feedback before implementing the proposed change.