FloC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google is controversial Project Replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into user groups with similar interests is dead. Instead, Google announced a new proposal today: subjects.
The idea is that your browser learns about your interests as you browse the internet. It stores data for the last three weeks of your browsing history, and as of now, Google limits the number of topics to 300, with plans to expand this over time. Google advises that these topics do not include sensitive categories such as gender or race.
To find out your interests, Google categorizes the websites you visit based on one of these 300 topics. For sites that haven’t been previously categorized, a simple in-browser machine learning algorithm takes over and provides an estimated theme based on the domain name.
Photo credit: Google
When you come across a site that supports the Topics API for advertising purposes, the browser tells you three topics you’re interested in – one for each of the last three weeks – randomly selected from your top five topics of each week . The website may then share these with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would be a more private way of deciding which ad to show you – and Google notes that it also gives users far greater control and transparency than the current standard. Users can review and remove themes from their lists – and also disable the entire theme API.
“The design of the themes was influenced by our findings from the previous FLoC studies,” said Ben Galbraith, head of Google’s privacy sandbox, in a press conference ahead of today’s announcement. “And this resulted in a bunch of great feedback from the community, as you probably know. As such, Topics supersedes our FLoC proposal, and I want to stress that this whole process of sharing a proposal, running a test, collecting feedback, and then iterating on the designs — that’s the whole open development process we do for the sandbox and really wanted to show that the process is working as intended.”
Photo credit: Google
Galbraith noted that Google has spoken to a number of parties to gather feedback on this new proposal, but today marks the beginning of the company’s process of working with the ecosystem. It remains to be seen whether other browser vendors will be interested in adding the Topics API. Since they were all quick to give FLoC the cold shoulder, I’m a bit skeptical that they want to adopt the Topics API, but it will be interesting to see how the ecosystem reacts.
It’s also worth noting that topics are just one possible signal for advertisers to decide which ad to show a specific user. In a way, for them it just becomes another signal that can be enriched with, for example, data about the article a user is reading or other contextual data about the user.
The plan is to start testing the Topics API later this quarter, but to get the ball rolling, Google released one today as well technical explainer that delves a little deeper into the details of the proposal.
