Google is on a mission to replace cookies with something better, but thus far every alternative it has built would give it even more power over the web.
In 2021, Google pulled the trigger on it’s grand plan to get rid of cookies — a fundamental but problematic part of the internet as we know it — and replace them with a new “privacy-first alternative” called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. In theory, it was a great idea, but unfortunately the scheme didn’t pan out nearly as well as Google had hoped.
Google Topics sounds like a win-win on the surface. It not only allows advertisers to target your interests, but it does so without compromising any of your personal information. Even the browsing information the browser uses to infer your topics never leaves your computer — a remarkably more private experience from the invasive nature of cookies, which are essentially little bits of data advertisers store on your devices to profile and follow you across the internet.
FLoC’s other big shortcoming was that because it swept your entire browsing history to learn your interests, it enabled advertisers to target you based on your every little movement on the internet — as opposed to cookies, which are more limited and only worked on the sites they were manually programmed on.
Advertisers aren’t happy with how infrequently topics update, or their quantity restrictions. Google adds just one new topic every week, and given how rapidly online trends and people’s attention change, advertisers believe by the time they get a fresh batch, they’d be already outdated. The loss of third-party cookies is estimated to cut advertiser revenue by a staggering 70 percent, and Topics, many believe, could worsen that figure.
Some also fear Google will unfairly tap into the mountains of data it will extract through Topics to target people. In a statement, a company spokesperson told Digital Trends that “as the Privacy Sandbox proposals are developed and implemented,” their work will “not give preferential treatment or advantage to Google’s advertising products or to Google’s own sites.”
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