Relevant Ads Without Tracking? Google Revamps Cookie Replacement for Chrome

pcmag.com:

Google’s latest stab at replacing cookie-based advertising involves using Chrome to determine a handful of topics you’re interested in, and then feeding a random one to advertising networks.  

The ad personalization approach is called “Topics API,” and its goal is to replace tracking cookies in Chrome with a privacy-preserving alternative. 

The new system addresses how many websites and ad networks use a variety of cookies and computer scripts to track your browsing history in an effort to serve you targeted ads. The ad-based surveillance is why other browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have gone out of their way to block third-party cookies by default to protect users' privacy. 

Google, on the other hand, has been trying to rein in the cookies without disrupting online advertising, a key generator of company revenue. In 2019, Google kicked this off with FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts, which proposed serving relevant ads to users by tracking their activities in a bulk format. Users would get placed in clusters of like-minded peers interested in the same topics. In turn, Google’s Chrome browser would assign each cohort an ID, which websites could use to determine what ads to serve. 

“This approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser,” Google wrote a year ago.  

But not everyone was a fan of the plan. The Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy group and the makers of the Vivaldi browser argued Google’s FLoC idea could still share sensitive information about users to advertisers through the cohort IDs. 

“They can see that every person who buys certain medical products seems to be in the group (FLoC) 1324, or