Google Discontinues the FLoC and Introduces the Topics API to Replace Ad Tracking Cookies

Google Discontinues the FLoC and Introduces the Topics API to Replace Ad Tracking Cookies

Short News:-

Google announces a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics. Topics will categorize users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. The idea is to facilitate interest-based advertising by showing users more relevant ads, without needing to know the specific sites that have been visited. Users can see and remove topics or disable them altogether. Google's FLoC will replace third-party cookies over privacy concerns.

Detailed News:-

A new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics, which organizes user browsing history into 350 categories, was announced by Google on Tuesday, ending the company's controversial intentions to replace third-party cookies.

For a period of three weeks, the new technique replaces FLoC (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts), which stored users' browsing history in a list of their top pre-designated interests (i.e., subjects).

It then shares three of the user's interests, one from each of the prior three weeks, with the participating site and its advertising partners when a user visits. Topics may be viewed, and users can remove or disable them entirely, in order to provide them more control over the framework

Ads that are more relevant to a user's interests can be shown to them without having to know which exact websites they've visited, thanks to assigning each website a generic, high-level topic and sharing the most common themes connected with their browsing history.

As a Chrome developer experiment, Subjects uses machine learning to predict topics based on hostnames and excludes sensitive factors like sexual orientation, religion, gender, or race from the list of possible topics.

Vinay Goel, privacy director of Privacy Sandbox, stated that because Topics is powered by the browser, it gives a more identifiable way for you to monitor and choose how your data is shared, compared to tracking technologies like third-party cookies.

Following the backlash from privacy campaigners, Google said in June 2021 that it will delay the launch of FLoC from early 2022 to late 2023 due to the fact that "additional time is needed throughout the ecosystem to get this right."

Additionally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) deemed FLoC a bad idea that increased users' privacy issues, which Topics aim to address.

FLoC, in particular, was criticized for creating "cohorts" based on a combination of different online interests that could lead to the classification of users in a way that could lead to discrimination. A small cohort could be used to identify a person, effectively weakening privacy protections if other tracking information is linked with it.

In response to growing privacy concerns, Google is phasing out third-party cookies. There are projects being dubbed "Privacy Sandbox" that are aimed at developing privacy-focused alternatives to existing web capabilities that restrict tracking of users while keeping existing web capabilities, including advertising. And Goel continued, "Online businesses have an option that does not use covert surveillance techniques, such browser fingerprinting, in order to continue presenting relevant adverts.