Third-party cookies are out, with browser makers and advertising companies alike looking into alternatives to these overarching supercookies that can track you across different websites. However, Google’s initial proposal, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), was quickly dismissed after heavy criticism from media and concerns voiced by privacy advocates. The company went back to the drawing board and came up with Topics, its latest supposedly privacy-friendly ad targeting option for Chrome, and now, it’s starting the first test runs in the Canary version of the browser.
Even if you use Chrome Canary, you won’t run into ads powered by Topics just yet. Right now, the code is made available to developers to test how Topics behaves and how well it works in a real browser environment. This will help companies prepare the integration of relevant APIs and test data flows, long before Google flips on the switch for this new user tracking method.
In the beginning, Google is only hoping to receive technical feedback, while in the long form, it wants to work with companies on business use cases, but the company will almost surely also get to hear a word or two from privacy watch dogs, which will likely scrutinize the new technology closely. In any case, Google says it’s strongly encouraging public feedback.
When everything goes well in the Canary test run, Google will expand the Topics experiment to the beta version until it will eventually hit random people using the stable version of Chrome. For end users, Google will also test a set of controls in Chrome settings. The new options, which you can see in the mockups above, allow you to see and manage what interests Topics associates with you. In the end, this lets you see and tweak what kind of advertisements you receive based on which of your interests. It will also make it easy to opt out of the test — much more transparent than FLoC has ever been.
Topics is part of Google’s overarching Privacy Sandbox. It consists of a set of tools that’s supposed to make it harder for advertisers to link data to individual users all while still serving relevant targeted ads, thus (hopefully) allowing developers and publishers to keep their content free. Privacy advocates are skeptical about Google's push to this new technology, though, so it remains to be seen how things pan out.