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Social Media Today reports that as part of its ongoing effort to phase out third-party cookie tracking, and replace it with a new, privacy-friendly data insights process for web publishers, Google has today announced a shift in its approach, with a new topic-based structure now being proposed to both protect user privacy and facilitate publisher insight.
The new process will replace Google's FLoC, or 'Federated Learning of Cohorts' process, which it had been working on to replace cookies. As explained by Google:
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"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 are kept for only 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."
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Google also says that the topics list would be limited to around 350 topics "to reduce the risk of fingerprinting". Which would indeed ensure enhanced privacy, but if Google was to increase the number of topics, that could become problematic, enabling more specific, and potentially discriminatory targeting based on these elements. For its part, Google says that its list of topics is "thoughtfully curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race". So it should cover off on any such concerns, but still, the more options available, the more specific targeting can get, which may not be a significant enough improvement on current data privacy processes. From a user standpoint, Google says that Topics would give people more control over their online experience, as it will be more transparent than cookies:
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"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."
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