To be expected, Google recently announced that they are going to be moving away from their Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) solution and are now proposing a new solution they are calling ‘Topics’.
This will not come as a shock to many, with the evolution of FLoC facing a number of challenges along Google’s journey to create a new audience solution to replace cookies. In early 2021, European regulators rejected the concept of FLoC, in line with GDPR, as it did not do enough to ensure user privacy was maintained.
After attempting to make modifications, regulators still rejected this as a viable solution. The writing was seemingly on the wall in August last year when, after a year of development and announcing delays in the depreciation of cookies to give them more time, one of Google’s tech leads, Josh Karlin, stated that it would probably be easier to focus on topics rather than cohorts.
The approach of Topics is for the browser to identify up to five key topics or categories that represent your top interests over the last week. These topics would appear as ‘Travel’ and ‘Automotive’, for example. People will be able to check and remove topics that they may feel is not accurate to them, similar to Google’s current Ad Preference settings.
There will be around 300 different topics that a user may be classified as interested in, with the top five being used. Topics will be stored for up to three weeks, but can be refreshed every week to keep it relevant. The difference between FLoC and Topics is that these Topics will be processed on the device, and not stored on any external servers, including Google’s. No sensitive information, such as ethnicity or sexual orientation, will be tracked.
By not storing the information on any server, it becomes nearly impossible to ‘fingerprint’ users to track specific user consumption and behaviours. This is crucial as it was one of the main barriers regulators identified regarding privacy concerns with FLoC.
FLEDGE, Google’s remarketing solution, is still a focus for the company and we will hopefully get more information on this soon. Looking closely, there are elements of what Google was trying to do FLoC in Topics. However, Topics does look to operate more effectively within the privacy space that started this journey.