How to turn off Google Chrome’s new “Privacy Sandbox” tracking (and why you want it)

Internet users increasingly want anonymous browsing experience, which has a major impact on advertising, e-commerce and the online economy as a whole. If a company cannot track you with third-party cookies, it is more difficult to earn money. Google is testing a new technology to replace cookies called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) which Google says will help protect user privacy and current business models for online businesses.

You can read the tech overview from Google here, but the bottom line is that users will have a unique FLoC ID. Your username is technically anonymous, but you will be grouped with other users with a similar Internet history: your “cohorts”. Instead of selling an individual’s data, companies like Google will sell cohort data to advertisers.

But although “private” on paper, as we have already explained, This is not entirely true. In fact, FLoC is likely to be just as intrusive, if not more, than third-party cookies. Depending on the size of a cohort and the number of cohorts to which a person belongs in the database, a person could likely be identified, among other serious concerns.

The good news is that FLoC will only be implemented on Chrome: no other browser will use FLoC, not even other Chromium browsers like Brave, Edge or Vivaldi. It is not yet ready for large-scale implementation. In fact, Google has delayed the rollout of FLoC for Chrome. However, it is currently in a first phase of testing, and it may be present on your browser as a new feature called “Privacy Sandbox”. To be fair, less than 1% of Chrome users take the Privacy Sandbox test, but the test can expand over time, and you may be signed up for this new form of tracking without even signing up. to notice.

Fortunately, it’s easy to check if Privacy Sandbox is enabled, and if so, you can block it or unsubscribe.

How to find and disable Privacy Sandbox (FLoC) in Chrome

Privacy Sandbox is only active for a tiny fraction of desktop Android and Chrome users in the US States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and the Philippines. It’s not (yet) on iOS devices.

Still, it’s worth checking if the feature is active. These steps apply to Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of Chrome:

1. Open Chrome and go to Settings> Privacy and security> Privacy Sandbox.
2. This will open the Privacy Sandbox home page even if you are not part of the trial.
3. If the “Privacy Sandbox Trials” toggle is enabled, then FLoC is enabled. Click / tap to turn it off, but don’t turn it on if you don’t want Chrome to use FLoC.

Alternatively, the “Am I FLoCed? “ the website quickly searches for the trial version of Privacy Sandbox on Chrome. If the test is positive, use the above steps to turn off FLoC tracking.

If you don’t see the option in Chrome’s settings, you aren’t part of the test. This does not mean, however, that you will not be added to the Privacy Sandbox trial in the future. Fortunately, Chrome users can preblock FLoC tracking using this DuckDuckGo browser extension.

[ZDNet]