June 25, 2021

After regulators, privacy advocates and major websites roundly condemned the company’s controversial Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) system, which aims to replace cookies, Google has now published plans to delay the new system by a year and a half.

The company said that “it’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right.”

FLoC, the replacement tracking system, lets Chrome create an ad profile on users’ computers and send the profile to advertisers whenever they need it, rather than letting individuals hide a third-party cookie on users’ computers to track the websites they visit for ad interest.

Google says this is not the company’s only plan and that it will slow down after “substantial feedbacks” from the web community after the first try with FLoC.

For more information, read the original story in Arstechnica.