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:

If the core team decides to make this code opt-in instead of opt-out, it will be a major blow to Google's FLoC initiative. With all the push back from both the website and browser front, it seems their idea is DOA.

it seems their idea is DOA.

Exactly my thinking, DOA.

I don't see why it shouldn't be opt-in, unless stats show most people are already choosing to opt-out from cookies.

Doesn't Google own a small percentage of Wordpress? Shouldn't you have to opt IN to things instead of being thrown in and cooked for a while before deciding?

I'm reserving judgment until I see it in the wild but I don't want to be made to play with it first. A search engine imposing that kind of thing feels like an overstep of sorts.

Shouldn't you have to opt IN to things instead of being thrown in and cooked for a while before deciding?

Assuming you're not logged in: Take a look at YouTube and how Google nags and nags for you to sign in, or take the free trial. That is an example of where Google has inherited YouTube's system of opted out. It tried to pull everyone into its logged in accounts a few years back with the user name debacle. Now, Google constantly wants a sign up and doesn't want to set a cookie for your preference. It's Google's way, or no way. That applies to so much Google does.
That's not to mention the ads that have become so annoying I use YouTube less and less these days.

What about FLoC?
I still believe it's Google's way of appeasing the authorities by moving from individual user tracking to cohorts, making it less about an individual. Remember, this is going to be Google's system.

If this WordPress proposal becomes a reality, and remember it is a proposal at this stage, it really is likely to be impossible for FLoC to be all-encompassing as Google would like.

It is not only about appeasing authorities IMO. Search, YouTube, maps and even their cloud are just by-products for Google that serve as eye-ball vehicles for the main product. Their main money making machine is Google Ads. The phasing out of third-party cookies disables their targeting and hurts directly in their revenues. FLoC is as close as they can get in targeting individuals without actually targeting individuals.

By using their browser they hope to have an advantage over all those other ad brokers that don't have access to a custom piece of tracking software installed on the majority of end-user devices.

But in the end, what would you like more? A tracking system where a small piece of visible info called a cookie is exchanged between your browser and selected sites on the internet, or a tracking system in a browser with a piece of black box software which continuously examines all your browsing history of the previous week (yes all, sites, not only the sites which now send cookies) and assigns some almost user-identifiable ID to it?

I genuinely share the Wordpress developers' concerns. I hope they make it an opt-in setting, rather then opt-out.

@engine For youtube there is a solution for the ads: uBlock. I've been using it for the past few years. But, as long as a site behaves, it is whitelisted. webmasterworld is whitelisted, greasyfork too, tampermonkey.net ...

There is also a solution for the sign-in dialog. I won't give the link here, but I've written a userscript to dismiss the different dialogs that yt shows to the user, as well as some code to prevent it from pausing/stopping the current video (which is a problem if you only hide the dialogs).

If the core team decides to make this code opt-in instead of opt-out,

Surely under the GDPR it HAS to be opt-in?

Some companies, including Apple, still flout this legislation, I recently had to opt-out of their unsolicited newsletter.

@RedBar , I was wondering: is UK still under de GDPR umbrella?

Aha...the UK now has its own version known as the UK-GDPR (United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation).

The new UK-GDPR took effect on January 31, 2020.

The UK-GDPR is almost word for word completely identical to the EU’s GDPR.