This Tuesday (25), Google announced the Topics API, a tool that will allow you to identify the user’s consumption profile without needing cloud processing. Designed to replace cookies, the novelty aims to target online advertising, without violating the privacy of the public.
The Topics API is part of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to ensure that user data on the web is discreet, without significantly interfering with the revenue of publishers, creators, developers and advertisers. For Google, it is important to ensure that the user has broad control over their own data, including deciding with whom it should be shared.
Rather than using the power of the cloud to define user consumption patterns, the Topics API reduces the scope of this process to fit on the computer itself — it’s all done through the browser, in fact. The tool will serve to define which topics are of interest to the user based on browsing history, without having to send data to Google.
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With Topics, Google is able to identify topics such as “Fitness”, “Travel”, “Comics and animation” and “Sports” based on user habits and, with them, pull more interesting ads and content from the internet. In the future, the user may even have control over which themes are interesting or not in the browser settings.
The Topics API replaces FLoC
In the announcement, Google clarifies that the Topics API arises from comments and discussions about FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). The alternative to cookies was widely criticized by data protection authorities and competing browsers, both for not providing true privacy to users and for concentrating decision-making power in the hands of the Search Giant.
Unlike the Topics API, FLoC was based on cohorts to trace consumption profiles, that is, huge clusters of user data segmented by interests. From it, it would be possible to trace age, gender, social class, academic background and hobbies to optimize advertising targeting, something that, in practice, would not be so far from traditional cookies.
In addition, the new initiative will not address sensitive topics, such as gender, race or sexual orientation, to target advertising. The measure serves not to generate discrimination on the part of advertisers, as well as to minimize the chance of online harassment through advertising.
When will the Topics API be released?
Testing with the Topics API will start soon — initially in Chrome. In this first phase, controls on user interests and tools for implementing the novelty on websites will be made available, which will also serve to observe revenue fluctuation and the reaction of advertisers.
This period will be important to improve the API based on feedback from developers and brands, so some things may still change. In the future, according to Google, the API will be made available on Chromium (an engine that powers rivals such as Microsoft Edge) and on competing browsers, which will be free to implement the tool as they wish.
For now, there is no forecast for the implementation of the Topics API, but the changes will be evident in the browsers involved. More information about the novelty can be found in the official Topics repository on GitHub.
