---
title: 'Google FLoC'
url: 'https://h3artbl33d.nl/blog/yet-another-google-clusterfuck'
markdown: 'https://h3artbl33d.nl/blog/yet-another-google-clusterfuck.md'
date: '2021-04-15'
description: 'The evil empire known as Google is experimenting with yet another clusterfuck of a technology, known as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) - which is basically a technique to track visitors on the web, without the requirement of cookies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains pretty well why…'
---

# Google FLoC

*The evil empire known as Google is experimenting with yet another clusterfuck of a technology, known as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) - which is basically a technique to track visitors on the web, without the requirement of cookies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation [explains pretty well why it is terrible](https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea).*

In the current implementation, Chrome users can disable partaking in the experiment by disabling third party cookies (*not just in Incognito, but enabling third party cookies in general*). Moreover, server and website operators can disable FLoC by adding a header to the response. I've 'misused' my SysOp hat and rolled it out over several hundreds server - thereby effectively adding it to thousands of websites. If you operate a webserver or website I recommend doing the same. Here is how you can add the header to a number of different configs:

**Relayd**

If you are using relayd, you can add the following line to the `http protocol` section:

```
match response header set "Permissions-Policy" value "interest-cohort=()"
```

**Nginx**

For nginx the following line can be either set serverwide or in the `server {}` context:

```
add_header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()" always;
```

**lighttpd**

```
setenv.add-response-header += (
  "Permissions-Policy" => "interest-cohort=()" 
)
```

**HAproxy**

Add the following line and reload HAproxy:

```
http-response set-header Permissions-Policy interest-cohort=()
```

**rocket-nginx**

Open `/etc/nginx/rocket-nginx/rocket-nginx.ini` with your favorite text editor, scroll down to line 43 and insert the following line:

```
http_header[Permissions-Policy] = "interest-cohort=()"
```

Run the parser (`php rocket-parser.php`) and restart nginx.

**Apache httpd**

With Apache httpd, the following lines can be set in the `.htaccess` file in the document root - or add it to the serverwide context:

```
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header always set Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()"
</IfModule>
```

---

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