Google has announced Topics, a new proposal for interest-based advertising as it moves to block third party cookies for digital ads on the Chrome browser.
The new system will replace its earlier proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) system.
“We’re announcing Topics, a new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising. Topics was informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials, and replaces our FLoC proposal,” the tech giant said in a blog post.
The announcement comes as Google is moving to phase out third-party cookies by 2023.
Google last year had deferred the deadline to 2023. Chrome would phase out third-party cookies over a three month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in late 2023, Google had said in a blog post.
The tech giant will launch a developer trial of Topics in Chrome that would include user controls, and enable website developers and the ads industry to try it out.
“The final design of the user controls and the other various technical aspects of how Topics works will be decided based on your feedback and what we learn in the trial,” it said.
How it works
With Topics, the web browser would determine a few topics representing users’ top interests, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” for that week based on their browsing history. Topics will be stored for three weeks and old topics are deleted.
“Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers. When you visit a participating site, Topics picks just three topics, one topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners,” it explained.
It is also building user controls in Chrome that would let users see the topics, remove topics that they don’t like or disable the feature completely.
Topics would exclude “sensitive categories,” such as gender or race, Google further said.
“Because Topics is powered by the browser, it provides you with a more recognisable way to see and control how your data is shared, compared to tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies. And, by providing websites with your topics of interest, online businesses have an option that doesn’t involve covert tracking techniques, like browser fingerprinting, in order to continue serving relevant ads,” it said.
How Topics are received by the user and the industry is to be seen.