From cohorts (group of people) to interests, Google has made a change in its game plan to replace 3rd-party cookies. The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) was a type of Web tracking that grouped people into “cohorts” based on their browsing history for the purpose of interest-based advertising. Google began testing the technology in the Chrome browser in March 2021 as a replacement for 3rd-party cookies.
Today, Google said it was moving away from the FLoC experiment. Instead, it announced that FLoC would be replaced with “Topics”, a proposal by its Privacy Sandbox for interest-based advertising. The concept of Google Topics was formed by its community feedback from the earlier FLoC trials.
Making this announcement on The Keyword, Vinay Goel, Product Director, Privacy Sandbox writes: With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history.
Topics will be kept for 3 weeks only, while the earlier topics will be deleted. Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers, said the blog post. When you visit a participating site, Topics will pick just 3 topics, 1 topic from each of the past 3 weeks, to share with the Site & its advertising partners. Thus, claimed Vinay, Google Topics will enable browsers to give users meaningful transparency & control over this data. Google is now building user controls in its Chrome browser that will let users see the topics, remove any they don’t like or disable the feature completely.
Because Topics is powered by the browser, it provides you with a more recognizable 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.
– The Keyword
Image credit: Google
