Google ditches FLoC and announces theme for future cookieless ad system

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Google announced a new theme API for its Privacy Sandbox project on January 25, 2022. API replaces the controversial FLoC project.

When Google announced FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in mid-2021, it revealed a plan to transform online advertising from user tracking to Group tracking plan. Users will no longer be tracked individually through the use of cookies, but will instead be joined into groups based on their interests. The site will gain access to these interests and can display ads based on this.

FLoC-enabled programs, such as Google Chrome, analyze a user's browsing history, join groups based on the data, and store the information locally.

Companies such as DuckDuckGo, Brave or Vivaldi reject FLoC for a number of reasons, including that group information could become a powerful fingerprinting identifier because groups consist of thousands of users. Other objections include letting Google determine what information it considers sensitive that the company wants to exclude from advertising purposes and inform any sites of interest, even if they have never been visited in the past.

An announcement from Vinay Goel, Google Privacy Sandbox and Chrome Product Director, confirmed that Google has removed FLoC from its Privacy Sandbox program. The company plans to replace it with the Topics API, which Goel introduced in a post on The Keyword blog.

Themes are based on the idea of ​​associating themes with the user's browsing behavior. Programs like Chrome will still analyze browsing history to identify these topics, but they will no longer assign users to cohort groups.

Identify the "few" topics that represent the most interest to users and save them for three weeks. After this, old themes will be removed and new themes will be added based on the user's browsing. According to Google, the entire process happens locally.

When a user visits a site, the site is informed of three available topics, one from each week's views. This website and its advertising partners may use this information to display advertisements to users.

Google plans to introduce controls to make the entire process transparent to users; this includes options to view themes, delete them, or even disable the feature entirely. According to Google, the topics do not include sensitive topics such as gender or race.

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