Google has been planning for years to discard cookies, small files stored on our computers as we browse the Internet that allows advertisers to follow and target us. This week, he announced he was stepping down from his scheduled post, called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), in order to harvest a new tool called Topics. Here is what it means for you and your online privacy.
Why do we need any kind of tracking?
There is little tracking about providing service to users and more about advertising and profit. Advertisers pay to put their products and services in front of people who feel they may be their customers - perhaps the bicycle company wants to identify men between the ages of 18 and 25, living in the UK, who have a lot of income and who have recently browsed a competitor's website. Tracking, with large data collection companies like Google or Meta, allows them to do just that.
But more and more people are growing uneasy at the level that companies are tracking, analyzing and marketing them. And governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on law enforcement agencies. Companies like Google may be responding in part to changes in customer experience with these new tools, but the reality is that they too are being pressured to do something.
What was FLoC?
Google's original plan was to better protect individual privacy by collecting groups - groups - with demographics or shared interests. Advertisers will pay to identify, say, the vast majority of the 1000 young men living in the UK, have a lot of lost revenue and have just bought bicycles, rather than people like that definition.
FLoC was unpopular with secretive campaigners, who said it was still possible to identify people by combining all these pieces of information into a larger image. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stated that the FLoC "will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but will create new ones in the process".
What is the new system?
The new tool, Articles, does exactly what FLoC should have done - keeping our identity and movement hidden from advertisers - but in a slightly different way. Chrome will enter a code that monitors the sites we visit and learns about our interests. It will keep this information in place for only three weeks at a time, and categorize us all by listing 300 as "fit" or "fashionable".
When you visit a website, your browser will allow advertisers to access three of these topics, randomly selected, in order to determine which ads they will show you. Worse, those three articles are all websites and advertisers will be allowed to know about you - they will not get information about gender or race, for example.
But concerns remain in some areas. "The Topics API only affects the smallest, smallest privacy issues in FLoC, while leaving its backbone," wrote Peter Snyder in an article on a browser-focused browser website.
What will it mean for web users and advertisers?
Topics will only collect information for Chrome users, although many people who use other browsers may use Google web search, email, calendar or a host of other resources, so that the company can still collect information that way. There are other privacy options, such as Apple's Private Relay, that allow you to browse anonymously and keep data out of the reach of advertisers.
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