Google replaces FLoC with ‘Topics’ as the alternative to third-party cookies

Google has abandoned the FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) for Topics as the alternative to cookie trackers.

“Topics was informed by our learning and widespread community feedback from our earlier FLoC trials, and replaces 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.

This is unlike FLoC that’d slot users into groups with similar interests and let advertisers target these groups with interest-matching ads.

When you visit a participating site, Topics picks just three topics, one topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners. Google says you have control over this process. “… in Chrome, we’re building user controls that let you see the topics, remove any you don’t like or disable the feature completely.”

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash