Google is testing a replacement for third-party cookies after experimenting with its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) concept for nearly a year.
A replacement will be browsed based on the approach that will show relevant content and ads while preserving a user’s privacy. The feature would check every five topics every week based on the user’s recent browsing history. For instance, the browser would match a sports website with the topic “Sports” and a yoga website with “Fitness”.
The topic identification will be done within the user’s device, without sharing data with external servers, including Google servers, the company said, adding that “topics are kept for only three weeks” and the older ones are deleted. The system then selects three topics, one new topic per week, to share with sites the user visits.
According to Google rules, the browser would use a finite number of topics picked from a human-curated, publicly visible list, initially containing about 350 topics. Moreover, the topics list would be curated to not include sensitive categories, like race, gender, or religion.
Since the new approach is powered by the browser, users will be able to see the topics and remove any they don’t like, or disable the feature entirely in Chrome Settings.
Google’s new system for interest-based advertising will replace FLoC, its earlier attempt that was developed to protect individuals’ privacy by placing them in a large crowd, a cohort, of thousands of people with similar recent browsing activity without any of them being individually identified.
Cookies are a popular web tracking tool that constitute the foundation of the online advertising industry. The company has faced criticism from advertisers and privacy groups, and also come under regulatory scrutiny. Earlier this month, France’s data privacy watchdog fined Google 150 million euros over its cookie policies.
“Topics was informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials, and replaces our FLoC proposal,” Principal Privacy Engineer (Director) at Google said.
Google on Tuesday said it is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), its replacement for third-party cookies, as a developer origin trial in Chrome.
FLoC gathers data based on the performance of the groups called cohorts, allowing advertisers to show relevant ads without identifying an individual personally. Data is stored locally.
On surfing the history of a user changes, its group also changes and users who prefer individual experience can get into websites and share the personal information they choose.
“Everyone in the ecosystem, including Google’s own advertising products, will have the same access to FLoC.”
In addition to this, the tech giant said Chrome analyses whether the cohort is visiting pages with sensitive topics at a high rate. If so, Chrome would ensure the cohort is not used, without learning which sensitive topics users are interested in.
Google will start the initial testing in India, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines and the US. In April, it will introduce a control in Chrome Settings to allow users to opt out of inclusion in FLoC and other Privacy Sandbox proposals.
Besides, the company is launching a new site, privacysandbox.com for updates on privacy sandbox, FAQs on FLoC and links to other resources.
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