Just Profit Google, Twitter Leave FLoC And Build Self Search System

Twitter is now launching its own search system and does not rely on FLoC. (photo: Souvik Banerjee/unsplash)

JAKARTA - Twitter has decided to remove Google's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) support from its social network. Instead, recently THEY added a new tracking technology to their platform.

Last month, security researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered that Twitter was collecting data for the FLoC by examining the source code of its website. But now, it appears the social network has removed support for FLoC from its website as the new tracking technology faces growing criticism online.

In a recent tweet, Wong explained that "Twitter has removed the code associated with collecting FLoC from users from now on". This could change in the future especially as Google is now in the process of rewriting FLoC as it has decided not to extend the trial of the tracking technology any further.

For those unfamiliar, FLoC is a tracking program that aims to replace third-party cookies by using machine learning algorithms to place people into groups based on their browsing habits and the data from these groups is then shared with advertisers. This of course only benefits Google.

While this is an improvement over the way third-party cookies are traditionally used to track individual users, a growing number of businesses have decided to exit FLoC or disable the technology altogether.

So far Brave, Vivaldi, Microsoft, GitHub, WordPress, DuckDuckGo, Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have voiced their opposition to FLoC which could be one of the reasons Google did not extend its trial period.

However, Google isn't done with FLoC yet and the company plans to bring its improved tracking technology to the browser once again by the end of next year.