The grand plan to get rid of cookies, a fundamental but problematic part of the internet as we know it, was pulled by Google in 2021. It was a great idea, but it didn't pan out as well as the company had hoped.
In the face of regulatory troubles and industry backlash, Google pulled the plug on FLoC in January 2022, but it is not calling it quits just yet. It might be the company's last chance to take over the reins of the cookie world before the deadline.
Two years after it was unveiled, FLoC has hit one roadblock after another. Privacy advocates, internet companies, and advertisers were opposed to the plan, and it was obvious that it was going to be rejected by regulators in the U.K. and the U.S. The silver bullet that addresses FLoC's laundry list of concerns is supposed to be Topics, which is informed by learning and widespread community feedback from earlier FLoC trials.
No one is sure if it can.
The way Topics works is easy to understand. With Topics, your browser keeps an eye on your web activity and determines what you are interested in based on the websites you browse the most. If you read sports news regularly, it will assign you a category or category if you have been planning a vacation. It keeps a list of five of your most recent ones, with a sixth random one thrown out if anyone tries to identify you. Whenever you visit a website, Chrome shares a couple of your interests with its advertising partners so that they can show ads that are relevant to you.
On the surface, it sounds like a win-win. Advertisers can target your interests without compromising your personal information. Even the browsing information the browser uses to infer your topics never leaves your computer, as it's essentially little bits of data advertisers store on your devices to profile and follow you across the internet.
In a statement to Digital Trends, it was argued that advertisers will no longer be able to use third-party cookies to track people if they are killed. It claims that building a privacy-first alternative like Topics can offer a middle ground.
To make its case again, the company has learned from its FLoC mistakes.
In FLoC, Chrome grouped people with similar browsing patterns together and let advertisers target these groups instead of an individual's set of interests. This approach could expose a group of vulnerable users. Advertisers could easily reach those going through financial hardship if a few people were looking for loans online.
The topics aren't automated like they were in FLoC, and people are assigned from a list of topics by humans. Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Topics is more transparent and could potentially lower the risk of leaking sensitive information. Chrome users will have the option to opt out of certain topics.
FLoC's other big shortcoming was that it enabled advertisers to target you based on your every little movement on the internet, as opposed to cookies, which are more limited and only worked on the sites. Advertisers who are present on the site from where your topics are extract can use them to target you, but only if they are present on the same site as you.
It could prove to be a double-edged sword for the company. The revised system will favor the biggest advertisers and reward their presence on the web with richer information about users, according to Dr. Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of technology law and policy.
That is where the cookie quest begins to fall apart. There is still a conflict of interest regardless of the improvements. From where it earns most of its revenue, Google wants to control the industry. Topics is a solution designed to fix many of the problems of cookies, while also giving a leg up to its competitors.
Advertisers aren't happy with how frequently topics are updated. Advertisers believe that by the time they get a new topic, they are already outdated because of how quickly online trends and people's attention change. The loss of third-party cookies is estimated to cut advertiser revenue by 70 percent, and Topics could make that worse. The Topics system is compared to FLoC.
Advertisers will resort to covert tracking mechanisms anyway, as a result of the forecasted dip in revenue.
Having access to just five topics in a week provides very little value to the advertiser, and it will be very likely severely, according to the chief product officer at MediaMath.
Some are concerned that the data that will be collected through Topics will be used to target people. As the Privacy Sandbox proposals are developed and implemented, their work will not give preferential treatment or advantage to the company, according to a company spokesman.
Advertisers will resort to covert tracking mechanisms anyway, as a result of the forecasted dip in revenue. It is still possible for websites to correlate topics with other signals to infer sensitive information and profile users.
Until they meet all of the criteria, they are unlikely to take off, according to Mayer. Would they respect people's privacy preferences, would they protect them from shady tracking practices, and would they enable a more competitive online display advertising market?
The answers to the questions for the TopicsAPI were no, no, and no.
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