FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google’s controversial project to replace cookies for interest-based advertising by grouping users into user groups with similar interests, is dead. Instead, Google announced a new proposal: Topics. The idea here is that your browser learns your interests as you browse the web. 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 determine your interests, Google assigns the pages you visit to one of these 300 topics. For sites not previously ranked, a lightweight in-browser machine learning algorithm takes over and provides an estimated theme based on domain name.
Google has notified developers that they can now test Topics in Chrome Canary.
Cookies store information about your connections or what you have viewed on a shopping site. Advertisers use this information to better understand your behavior online and even offline, and to provide you with specific and targeted advertising that follows you around the web. Google has said it wants to make web browsing less invasive, but the company also wants to continue making money from online advertising. This wish led to the abandonment of cookies in favor of the FloC system.
Whatever goodwill Google may have shown in recent years, e.g. B. fighting ad abuse and systematic user tracking, its efforts have been challenged with the solution offered by the company. Fdr Cohort Learning or FLoC is touted as a better strategy that protects people’s privacy while still giving advertisers something to benefit from. However, privacy advocates are sounding the alarm about what they see as an even worse technology, and makers of Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are promising to fight FLoC in all its forms.
In short, FLoC changes individual user tracking and fingerprinting into group (cohort) identification based on similar browsing histories of members of that group. FLoC essentially categorizes people into groups based on similar surfing behavior, which means only cohort IDs and not individual user IDs are used to target them. The web history and the inputs to the algorithm are stored in the browser, with the browser only revealing a cohort of thousands of people.
However, many privacy advocates are unconvinced and see FLoC as an even worse solution than the problem it is trying to solve. Aside from potential violations of laws like the GDPR, critics also point out that FLoC collects more private data in the form of browsing history than even tracking cookies. Although unique individual identities can be hidden behind cohorts, the data stored in the browsing history can still be considered something private, especially if it will be easy to create profiles for members of this group.
In the face of the outcry, Google made another proposal to track users and allow advertisers to serve targeted ads: Topics API.
The new system would still eliminate cookies, but it would inform advertisers of a user’s areas of interest based on the user’s past three weeks of web browsing history. Topics are retained for three weeks before being deleted.
When you access a Topic API-enabled website for advertising purposes, the browser announces three topics of interest to you (one for each of the last three weeks), randomly selected from your top five topics for each week. The site may then share these with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would offer a more private method of deciding which ads to show you, and Google notes that this also gives users far greater control and transparency than is currently the norm. Users can view and remove themes from their lists, as well as disable the entire theme API.
Developers can now test themes
In a blog post, Google shared the news with developers:
Starting today, developers can test the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs worldwide in Chrome Canary. We will be transitioning a limited number of users from the Chrome beta as soon as possible. Once everything is working properly in the beta, we will make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to extend testing to more Chrome users.
We know it will take developers time to use APIs, validate data flows, and measure performance. We look forward to feedback from companies going through the various testing phases that allow us to continuously improve the APIs. Once we’re confident the APIs are working as intended, we’ll be making them generally available in Chrome so more developers can integrate, evaluate, and provide feedback as we continue to optimize them for their use cases.
Developers can look to Chrome for support in the form of developer guides, regular updates, and a range of feedback and interaction channels. We strongly encourage developers to share their feedback publicly and with Chrome, and we’ll be closely monitoring the progress on this. We also welcome the role that industry associations can play in this process, from facilitating joint industry testing to compiling feedback topics.
Chrome will also begin testing updated privacy sandbox settings and controls, allowing users to see and manage the interests associated with them, or disable testing altogether.
Themes allow Chrome to track your browsing history locally and create a list of interests, which Chrome then shares with advertisers when they request ad targeting. The FLEDGE API is responsible for both running an promotion directly on your device and selecting an advertiser and then targeting users based on their behavior, e.g. B. Leaving an item in a shopping cart. The Attribution*Reporting API is responsible for measuring ad clicks, impressions and tracking purchase conversions.
As well as setting up the first version of the system for advertisers, Google’s post also gives us a glimpse of what user controls will look like. There is now a chrome://settings/privacySandbox page where you can enable or disable the trial. On the browser-based ads customization page, you can see the topics Chrome finds interesting for you and remove the ones that don’t interest you.
Again, this only applies to the experimental Chrome Canary browser, which nobody uses as their daily browser, so it’s going to be a while before most people see these commands.
Vinay Goel, Product Director, Privacy Sandbox, Chrome, explains:
The privacy sandbox proposals have already benefited greatly from thoughtful feedback from early testers, and we look forward to opening tests for more of our proposals. We will continue to gather feedback from the ecosystem and work with regulators around the world, including through our work with the UK Competition and Markets Authority, in line with our Web Privacy Sandbox commitments.
On subjects he said:
With themes, your browser determines a handful of themes, like “fitness” or “travel and transportation,” that represent your main interests for a given week based on your browsing history. Topics are only kept for three weeks and old themes are deleted. Themes are curated entirely on your device with no external servers involved including Google servers. When you visit a participating site, Topics selects only three topics, one from each of the last three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners. Themes allow browsers to give you meaningful transparency and control over this data, and in Chrome we create user controls that allow you to view themes, delete the ones you don’t like, or turn off the feature altogether. .
More importantly, subjects are carefully screened to exclude sensitive categories such as gender or race. Because Topics is browser-powered, it gives you a more visible way to see and control how your data is shared, compared to tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies. And by serving up websites with your areas of interest, online businesses have an option that doesn’t involve secret tracking techniques like browser fingerprinting to continue serving relevant ads.
With 82% of its revenue coming from ad revenue, this latest Chrome development shows that Google doesn’t want to threaten its biggest moneymaker. Google continues to claim that it is imperative to create an alternative user tracking system for advertising purposes and the company assures that until this is done it will not block third-party cookies, regardless of the final solution.
Source: Google
What do you think of the theme API in their design? Do you think it is responding effectively to FloC’s concerns?