Google has new tech to track your web browsing – here’s how to stop it

Facebook has attracted an outsized share of attention this week over the way it tracks its users' activity, with that scrutiny coming as a result of Apple rolling out iOS 14.5 on Monday -- a highly anticipated new update to Apple's mobile operating software that will crack down on this type of tracking activity. However, Google has also been making news along these same lines, part of a privacy/user tracking headache all its own.

We've written on a number of occasions already this month that Google was launching a test of new technology in Google Chrome called FLoC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. It's ostensibly meant to let Chrome improve the anonymity of users -- which is something Google vowed to do a few weeks ago, via a movie to stop allowing advertisers to track users online with third-party cookies. However, Chrome will do this via FLoC while also still collecting some users' browsing data for advertising purposes. What struck many people as particularly frustrating is that even though Google said it would test this as part of a limited pilot run before rolling it out fully, the search giant didn't offer a straightforward way to opt out of the testing.