One of the most important developments in the PPC and digital advertising industry is the shift away from targeting methods that rely on using people’s personal data. In fact! the move towards cookies-less browsing and new privacy measures is so significant that it featured as one of our top PPC trends/tips for 2022.
Google’s initial proposal for a new tracking system! a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)! faced plenty of criticism from privacy advocates and industry figures. Now! Google has abandoned FLoC altogether and announced a new proposal! known as Topics.
Google replaces FLoC with Topics API
Google Product Director! Vinay Goel! gambling database published a post on the company’s blog page! The Keyword! on January 25 announcing the new Topics API for Privacy Sandbox. In the article! he confirms that the Topics proposal will replace FLoC! Google’s first attempt at delivering a tracking system that doesn’t rely on tracking users’ personal data.
“Today! we’re announcing Topics! a new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising. Topics was informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials! and replaces our FLoC proposal.” – Vinay Goel! Product Director! Privacy Sandbox! Chrome
Google’s FLoC proposal centred around grouping users anonymously into cohorts based on shared interests they show while browsing the web. Rather than targeting individuals! FLoC would have allowed advertisers to target these shared interests without using cookies or any technology capable of identifying individual users.
However! Google’s FLoC proposal
Drew criticism from privacy activists buy uk phone number list and key figures in the industry over concerns it would enhance the search giant’s dominance in digital advertising and create more privacy concerns than it would solve.
Google responded to the feedback by delaying the proposed implementation of FLoC and! now! it has abandoned it altogether.
Apple and some of the biggest names in web browsers have already blocked various forms of third-party tracking. Meanwhile! Google is trying to figure out a system that satisfies growing demands for privacy protection without sabotaging its advertising system! which relies so heavily on user data.
How is the Topics API different?
Vinay Goel’s Topics announcement azerbaijan business directory doesn’t give us a huge amount of technical detail about the inner workings of the API so we don’t know as much as we did about FLoC. This will change as Google releases more information about the technology and analysts have time to assess it in more detail – as they did with FLoC.
Until then! we can only go by the information provided in Goel’s article on The Keyword.
With FLoC! users would have been grouped into more than 30!000 cohorts and! crucially! the technology was going to use individuals’ browser history to group them into these cohorts with other users.
The Topics API works differently by temporarily assigning interests to users and deleting information on a tri-weekly basis.
“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.”
Again! this relies on users’ browser history but Google insists the Topics API can’t be used by other parties to create “fingerprints” of individual users – a key concern with the FLoC proposal.
Vinay Goel also explains that Topics reduces the total of interest topics to 350 more general interests. In addition to reducing the number and specificity of interests! Topics will only assign three interests to users and store this data for a maximum of three weeks before deleting it.
