Google offers users greater power in choosing which ads they wish to see

At Google I/O, the annual conference for developers, the internet giant announced My Ad Center which will launch later next year.

Google says “you’ll be able to easily manage your ads privacy settings and even choose to see ads from categories or brands you like — giving you more control over the ads you see across YouTube, Search and Discover.”

This news comes after Google, in January 2022, announced it abandoned the FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) for Topics as the alternative to cookie trackers; they track your movements across the internet making it easier to serve you relevant ads.

“Topics were informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials, and replace our FLoC proposal,” wrote Vinay Goel, Product Director, Privacy Sandbox, Chrome on 25 January 2022 on the company blog.

With Topics, your browser will record your browsing history for three weeks and will categorize your interests in select topics such as “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation”. These topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted. Sensitive categories such as gender or race are excluded.

FLoC would slot users into groups with similar interests and let advertisers target these groups with interest-matching ads.