According to Wired’s Matt Burgess, Google’s plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome hasn’t gone smoothly for its users. In January 2020 the company disclosed it would rebuild Chrome by removing cookies that follow people around the web in two years.
It’s January 2022 and Google is back with yet another plan. This week the company disclosed it was ditching Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a major part of its plan, and replacing it with a new system known as Topics.
Topics are just among the elements of Google’s wider Privacy Sandbox plan to actualize the end of third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Visibly, it’s a move to enhance user privacy. However, many privacy experts have maintained that its impact will not be much.
The ad tech industry is equally not happy, with opponents contending that Google is endeavoring to reshape online publicity in its image. During the third quarter of 2021 only, it made $53 billion from advertising alone—but the online world in which Google runs is changing.
Regarding restricting third-party cookies, Google is far behind its main rivals. Safari, Firefox, and Brave have all restrained the cookies for years. Apple’s Safari started the exercise way back in 2017. However, Google’s move is likely to have a great impact on the issue.
Chrome dominates 63% of the global browser market—which means Google is likely to establish a standard that others might be forced to obey. After failing with FLoC, the company is now introducing Topics as a distinct plan for the future of online advertising. That onlookers aren’t much sure of.
Topics function by examining your browsing history to work out the things you’re interested in. If you love cars, for instance, Topics will show you cars advertisements on the websites that you visit.
To work out that you love cars, each of the websites that uses Google’s Topics API will be allocated an overall category. A website about tattooing, for example, maybe categorized under body art, as a city newspaper will most likely fall under the local news category.
As you browse through the web, Chrome will keep a record of the categories you visit the most. Then, every week, your five favorite categories will be compiled up—Google says this process takes place on your device and not on its servers.
And a sixth incidental topic will be added to enlarge some noise in the system. These six categories are then conveyed to the websites you visit and are used to target the ads you see. Then the data is erased after three weeks.
“Topics was informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials,” Google product director Vinay Goel said in a blog post. The earlier system depended on the browsing history to group people with many others with similar interests. If Google’s algorithms deduced that you were interested in dogs, you’d be assigned to the same category as others who love dogs.
The plan was dumped after several major websites and rival browsers said they wouldn’t adopt the system. Regulators in the EU and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also carried out investigations into Google’s proposals. Privacy advocates advised that it wasn’t good for privacy, and the advertising industry wasn’t impressed either. So how about Topics?
“There are a couple of improvements in Topics,” says Hamed Haddadi, chief scientist at Brave, a privacy-focused browser and search engine. He says that under FLoC, people could have been grouped into more than 30,000 different categories, which would allow advertisers to gain specific knowledge of their interests. This information could then be combined with other data to build up an incredibly thorough picture of every one of us.
This is less likely in Topics, as there are around 350 interest classifications that can be allocated to people. Although the number is likely to increase—Google’s technical description says its end goal will be to get these topics from a third party, and there could be a “few thousand topics.” Haddadi also says adding a sixth random topic into people’s interests makes the system a little more privacy-conscious.
Another likely difference between FLoC and Topics is that Google alleges the latter will try to avoid allocating “sensitive categories” to people. Such as enabling individuals to be shown ads founded on their race or gender. FLoC was criticized for being likely able to produce or infer sensitive attributes via people’s behavior and interests.
Google claims that people will be allowed more control over the interest areas that are allocated to them and can change settings, block some topics, and opt-out in Chrome. However, practically, it’s unlikely many people will change Chrome’s settings in this manner.
Additionally, the risk of websites working out someone’s sensitive traits isn’t eliminated by Topics. “It is still possible that websites calling the API may combine or correlate topics with other signals to infer sensitive information, outside of intended use,” Google’s description of Topics says.
With time it would be possible for a site to “develop a list of topics that are relevant to that user,” and this may disclose sensitive information. There are other privacy and security issues too, that Google says it needs to fix. Google plans to test Topics in Chrome in the coming months, and the system could change founded on feedback.
Again there’s the competition issue. The smaller number of interests allocated to people could possibly hand yet more power to Google in the online advertising industry. Which, it already dominates. Paul Bannister, the co-founder of the ad management firm CafeMedia, says that Topics seems to be a step forward for people’s privacy, but a potentially back for advertising firms.
The 350 current interests contained in Topics are broad, Bannister says, and this means it’s bound to be less useful for advertisers trying to target individuals with products that they’re more likely to buy. “Those topics are fixed, so it’s harder to find unique segments that are interesting to your marketing campaign,” he says.
“As it stands, Topics seems to be only a solution for the Chrome browser. It is neither cross-browser nor cross-platform,” says Phil Duffield, UK vice president at the Trade Desk, a tech, and software company. The company built its cookie-replacement opponent that is based on identifiers associated with the email address people use to sign in to websites. “As with any complex technical challenge, there is no silver bullet, but we do believe in the importance of future solutions being interoperable and easily used by all players across the industry,” Duffield says.
Haddadi believes that Topics, in its current form, would improve privacy in Chrome, but that it still falls short of the standard set by almost all other browsers. “It’s just raising the bar for Chrome while a lot of other browsers, including Safari, Firefox, Brave, and Tor, already have extensive third-party blocking mechanisms.”
Although, Topics may help Google stay at the top of the advertisement industry for some time to come. Regulators could force Google to shift its approach—the CMA’s investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox is still ongoing, and the regulator has already told the firm to effect some changes.
While Apple’s advertisement business is quickly growing, Google will still be ahead of the pack. The firm owns the world’s biggest browser and search engine, and a vast advertising network. Topics might arguably differ from FLoC, but its goal remains the same: to retain Google’s control over the ads we see
