Google will replace Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) with a new interest-based targeting proposal called Topics, the company announced Tuesday. The Topics API will select topics of interest (based on the user’s browsing history), without involving external servers, and share those topics with participating sites. What does this mean? The cookie-less world has arrived.
How Does It Work?
“With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like ‘Fitness’ or ‘Travel,’ that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history,” Google said in the announcement.
When a user visits a Topics using site, Topics selects three topics to share (one from each of the previous three weeks) with the site and its ad partners. Topics are stored for 21 days, with topic selection occurring on the device, without involving any external servers, including Google’s own servers.
Google will start off with roughly 300 topics. If a site does not participate in the Topics API, “Then it doesn’t provide a topic nor does it receive a topic,” Galbraith said. The site itself or its advertising partners can opt into the Topics API.
For more technical information, Google has also offered a technical explainer containing more details about the Topics proposal.
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