Part of what Google has been calling its Privacy Sandbox, Topics provides a mechanism for serving ads that correspond to the inferred interests of web users.īasically, when a user visits a website and the website wants to show an ad, the website can run JavaScript code (or check the request header Sec-Browsing-Topics) to fetch a list of up to three topics, from a taxonomy of several hundred interest categories, derived from the user's past website visits. The Topics API is one of several possibly privacy-preserving proposals for handling digital advertising once support for third-party cookies goes away. Google, having last year abandoned its previous interest-based API, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), is nonetheless moving forward with Topics because it needs something that will enable interest-based advertising once the already delayed deprecation of third-party cookies occurs in Q3 2024.
"We've been working for ten years in the opposite direction, partitioning data per-top-level-site." "We don’t think cross-site data about the user’s browsing behavior should be exposed in APIs," he said. Unfortunately, it is hard to identify concrete ways in which this might be improved."Īnne van Kesteren, who works on web standards at Apple, cited ten issues with the API and declared that the iGiant is opposed to it. "Though the information the API provides is small, our belief is that this is more likely to reduce the usefulness of the information for advertisers than it provides meaningful protection for privacy. "Fundamentally, we just can't see a way to make this work from a privacy standpoint," said Mozilla distinguished engineer Martin Thomson, in January in response to a request for an official position statement from Karlin.
We just can't see a way to make this work from a privacy standpoint Both Firefox maker Mozilla and Safari developer Apple have indicated they oppose the Topics proposal. It remains an open question, however, whether other browser makers will ever support the API. "That's not a technical solution, but I do believe it goes a long way to addressing this problem. "Since this discussion, we've added a requirement on Chrome that developers enroll to use the API and to attest that they won't abuse the API," he wrote.
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