To the list of companies (Vivaldi, Brave, DuckDuckGo, GitHub) that have decided to boycott tracking through technology flock developed by Google is also added Amazon. The choice of the e-commerce giant, however, would be due to different reasons.
Amazon wants to protect purchase data
Almost two years ago, Google announced the Privacy Sandbox initiative with the aim of removing support for i third-party cookies and replace them with more environmentally friendly tracking technologies privacy of users. One of them, currently being tested, is called flock (Federated Learning of Cohorts) and provides for the creation of groups of people with common interests.
Each group is assigned an identifier that allows certain advertisements to be displayed when a user of the group visits the same site (therefore, cross-site tracking of the individual user does not take place). However, Google's decision triggered several protests and the initiation of antitrust investigations. Some companies have communicated their intention to boycott the FLoC technology and now it joins too Amazon.
In the HTML code of some sites owned by Amazon, including Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com and Zappos.com, there is the function that deactivates the tracking, so Google cannot receive data relating to visitor activities and include them in the "cohort ". Amazon's intention is to protect your valuable data which show which products are searched for, purchased and reviewed on e-commerce sites.
But the Seattle-based company also has another motivation, in that it plans to use an identifier for the monitoring of advertisements sold through its Demand-Side Platform (DSP). The choice would therefore not be due to respect for privacy, but to issues related to competition.
Source: Digiday Amazon also blocks Google's FLoC technology
