Google continues to move towards a world without cookies while maintaining Google Ads as its main source of income. Its first proposal for targeted advertising without cookies, FLoC, has been scrapped due to complaints from other industry players. Instead, he has presented Google Themes, a new solution that promises to be more respectful of user privacy. Let’s see what it is and how it works.
Say goodbye to cookies and the Privacy Sandbox
In 2020, Google announced that Eliminate support for third-party cookies in your Google Chrome browser throughout the next few years. This was a revolution for digital advertising, since advertisers had been using cookies for decades to be able to offer users more targeted and relevant advertising according to their specific interests.
These are the main types of cookies that Google will remove from 2022:
- Session cookies: they are used to analyze the user’s browsing behavior on a website and create profiles with the contents that a view has.
- Tracking cookies: they are used to create long-term records of multiple visits to the same site and thus be able to analyze the behavior of users on it.
- Authentication cookies: they are used to save if the user has logged in and if he is not accredited, and they store information to facilitate the login, such as passwords.
Google’s goal is not to end personalized advertising, but to Introduce new technologies that offer advertisers functions similar to cookies.but that they are more respectful with the privacy of the users.
As an alternative to cookie-based advertising, Google has launched the project privacy litter box, whose objective is to reduce the incorrect tracking of users while continuing to show them targeted ads based on their characteristics and interests.
Google has announced multiple applications within this project, such as APIs for aggregate reporting, ad budgeting, and measurement. The most controversial has been Federated Learning Cohort or FLoC APIwhose objective is to be able to continue advertising based on interests.
In order to track the individual behavior of each user (as was the case with cookies), FLoC created a series of “behavior groups” from which conclusions can be drawn. However, several players in the sector, such as the DuckDuckGo search engine and the Brave browser, spoke out against it, considering that it continued to present privacy problems.
How does Google Themes work?
Topics is the new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising. This tool is intended to capture the learnings and feedback received from the first tests of FloC.
With Google Topics, the users’ browser determined a series of Business, such as “Sport” or “Travel”, which represent the main interests of the user during the last week. This information is derived from your browsing history.
Topics of interest are selected. only on the user’s device, without involving any external servers (including those of Google). Topics are kept for only three weeks and then deleted. Being browser-based, allow the user to more easily see and control how their data is shared, compared to third-party cookies.
When the user visited a website that was part of the Topics ecosystem, they are chosen very shy (one from each of the previous three weeks) to share with the website and its advertising partners.
On a technical level, the API first tagged each website with a general theme, for example, “Kitchen”. The browser then compiles some of the most frequent topics from the websites the user has visited. The themes are then compared to the sites that have been visited and the user to help them show more relevant ads, without needing to know the specific sites that have been visited.
The browser uses a limited list of selected topics from a public list and created in a non-automatic way. The list proposal contains 350 items, to prevent sober information and the user from being too detailed and from accidental identification.
Google Topics allows browsers to display topic information transparently and give users control. In Chrome, user controls allow you to view listed items, remove items, or include disablement to complete this functionality. Additionally, to further protect users’ privacy, themes are curated to remove potentially problematic categories such as gender or race.
As Google has announced, they will soon launch a Test Themes in Chrome which were the user controls and will allow web developers and the advertising industry to test this new functionality. The final design of the user checks and other technical aspects will depend on the results of this review and the feedback received.
The differences between Google Topics and FLoC
Google’s previous proposal to replace cookies, FLoC, used browsing history to group users into groups of thousands of people. One of its most controversial aspects is that it had a lots of categories, which could even reach 30,000, and that meant that companies could have very detailed user profiles. In return, Topics is limited to about 350 categories, where only the information that companies receive is much less detailed.
Another important difference is that Google has stated that Themes noto identify sensitive categories for userslike gender or race.
In short, Google Topics will be a proposal that respects the privacy of users to the maximum. In the coming months we will see the results of the first tests and we will be able to assess whether it is a suitable solution to be able to carry out quality segmented advertising and see how other players in the sector respond.
