WordPress could treat Google FloC as a security issue

The WordPress proposal would see the blogging system use its weight to thwart FLoC.

“WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web — and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code,” it states.

For users that want to enable FLoC, the proposal states those users would likely be able to do so themselves, and a little more code would allow FLoC to be toggled on and off in blog settings.

“When balancing the stakeholder interests, the needs of website administrators who are not even aware that this is something that they need to mitigate — and the interests of the users and visitors to those sites, is simply more compelling,” the proposal states.

In order to get the block out to current users, WordPress has floated that FLoC be treated as a security problem and backported, rather than waiting until the next major release in July.

“Currently, 5.8. is only scheduled for July 2021. FLoC will likely be rolling out this month,” it states.

“Furthermore, a significant number of WordPress sites only update to minor versions. By back-porting, we can protect more sites and more visitors to those sites — and amplify the impact.”

FLoC has received some stinging criticism, mostly based on how it would share a summary of recent browser history with marketers, something third-party cookies could try to do, but were never guaranteed to be able to do so.