Google LLC today announced a new plan to replace tracking cookies designed to provide more privacy as browsers increasingly block cookies by default in order to protect users from prying eyes.

The project, named Topics, will replace Google’s previous attempt known as Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short. Which had come under fire from privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for failing to address privacy risks fully.

FLoC was announced in August 2019 with the intent to replace cookies, which are short text strings that third-party sites add to browsers in order to track users as they travel around the internet. Advertisers use cookies to personalize advertisements so that they can be targeted. However, that created privacy and safety issues, leading many users to begin blocking cookies.

According to Google, Topics is being crafted to respect privacy better while still enabling advertisers to produce relevant, targeted advertisements based on the interests of the user.

“With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like ‘Fitness’ or ‘Travel & Transportation,’ that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history. Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted,” said Vinay Goel, product director of the Privacy Sandbox at Google Chrome. “Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers.”

As users browse, Topics will select only three topics based on browsing behavior, one topic from each of the previous three weeks. It will then share them with the site and its advertising partners. Users can also see what topics have been chosen, remove any they don’t like and also disable the feature entirely.

Most important, Goel added, topics would be curated to exclude sensitive categories such as gender or race. The company said it had plans to “engage with external partners to help define this,” but outlined little other details.

According to the technical description of the project, the initial taxonomy of topics will include somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand topics, surrounding numerous consumer interests.

The objective of Topics, Goel said, is to provide a superior way to achieve transparency for targeted advertising that is better controlled by users, especially compared to current covert mechanisms. It has been the lack of this control and the intrusive nature of advertisements and cookies that has created greater attention towards privacy control.

“Google’s pivot — from FLoC to Topics — shows that consumers have lobbying power and a voice they are not afraid to use,” Wayne Coburn, director of product at marketing platform Iterable. “People understand that their data is valuable, and they are moving to preserve the value of their assets… With Topics, Google is admitting they need to do more to preserve and protect consumer privacy.”

Google plans to launch a developer trial version of Topics soon for the Chrome browser that will include use controls to enable website developers and the advertisements industry to build for it. The company plans to use community feedback from the industry and privacy organizations to develop the product to tune various technical aspects of the project based on the trial.

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