Google has been tracking people around the web for quite some time now and uses the results to show tailor-made ads. The company was able to generate $65.1 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2021, largely through advertising, up 41% from last year.
Google has been trying to keep the company going as many of its competitors have become more skeptical about the company’s constant surveillance of its users to show more useful ads.
Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) was a controversial browser-based model intended to provide advertisers with the same level of information in anonymized form. As part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox Initiative, the model focused on tracking user behavior across websites and combining the information into cohorts of interest.
Google Topics
Recently, in a blog post and on GitHub, Google announced a new tracking project called “Topics.”
With the Topics API for Privacy Sandbox, the search engine giant plans to group the web into 300 topics, adding more as the project progresses. When users hit one of the topics, their ID is associated with it.
Despite Google’s documentation of the Topics API, several questions remain to be answered regarding the implementation of privacy advocates.
Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher and director of privacy, Brave Software, said:
The root is Google’s insistence on sharing information about people’s interests and behavior with advertisers, trackers and others on the web who are hostile to privacy.
Google states that the groups are fairly harmless and will not be based on sensitive or personal topics. Details on the topics are kept for three weeks and then deleted.
The company hasn’t started rolling out the service yet, but once it’s rolled out, researchers will finally be able to understand how Topics works and answer any privacy concerns.
