Google has announced that it is abandoning its plan to replace third-party cookies with FLoC. The search giant is instead looking to use what it calls Topics APIs, a new system that will focus on “interest-based advertising.” The topics will pinpoint five of your main interests. This could include things like fitness, travel, etc. All the interests will be based on your web activity for 7 days.
Google has noted that the browser will store these topics of interest for three weeks after which they will be deleted permanently. Additionally, the tech giant says that the topics are solely going to be selected based on activity on your device. So, when you visit a site, for example, the new feature will show the site and its advertising partners your key interests.
This will include one topic from each of the past three weeks of browsing g activity from your device. At the moment, Google has over 350 topics or “interests” under its taxonomy. There is a plan to add a few hundred more in the future and eventually thousands of new categories as well. Despite this, the search engine giant assures the public that the categories will not involve sensitive things like gender, race, etc.
Also, users who are browsing using Chrome will have the opportunity to view and delete any topics or interests associated with them. However, the tools required to do that are not ready yet. Google says that it is in the process of building them and they will deploy in the future. There will also be a feature that allows you to completely turn off the Topics API so that your data is not shared with advertisers at all.
Google had put in place a commitment to replace all third-party cookies by 2023. While the search engine giant has put a lot of effort into that, it is running out of time. The company had proposed replacing third-party cookies with what it called FLoC or Federated Learning or Cohorts. It is more or less an interest-based tracking method that identifies user interests based on their specific “cohort”, which is essentially a group of people who share the same interests.
But there were concerns that the FLoC posed serious privacy risks, including the ability for advertisers to use browser fingerprinting to identify users. Many experts agree that Topics API is a much better option and an improvement of FLoC in many ways. But even then, some analysts argue that there is still some way to go.
Most argue that FLoC was inherently bad and this does mean an improvement on it is better or secure. It's, however, not the first time Google is using the idea of topics. The search engine giant did experiment with a similar approach in 2019 in what it called “private interest.” But privacy experts argued at the time that users would still be exposed to a lot of privacy risks. Whether the new API works well remains to be seen but Google is going ahead with this.
