Bye-bye FLoC, Hello Topics

It’s all very well saying that cookies are invasive and need to go, but replacing them with something better? That’s a much bigger challenge.

Attempt #1; FLoC

Google’s first attempt, Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, was launched to great fanfare in March 2021. The idea was that your online behaviour would earn you a spot in a “cohort” or group of similar users. Each cohort would contain several thousand users, in an effort to protect individual identities.

However, FLoC was immediately criticized by privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation as “a concrete breach of user trust”. The Competition and Markets Authority in the UK found that FLoC would give Google too much power “[by placing] the browser in a vital gatekeeper position for the adtech ecosystem.”

On January 25^th 2022, Google announced it would cease development of FLoC in favour of a new system; Topics

Attempt #2; Topics

Google wasted no time in proposing an alternative, which they are currently calling Topics. They have attempted to address the biggest issues with FLoC. Topics will use your web activity to determine your interests from general trends, rather than specific sites. For example, regular visits to Sky Sports and ESPN would assign you to the “Sports” topic. The key is that the individual sites used to identify you are not extracted from your computer, a noticeably more privacy-focused approach than cookies. Google has also said that along with your 5 most recent topics, a sixth one will be assigned to you at random to make you harder to identify. Topics will also exclude race, sexuality and other sensitive information.

That’s not to say that everyone is happy. With Topics only updating once per week, and storing a maximum of 5 most recent topics, advertisers are worried that the data it provides will be out of date before it can be used effectively.

The biggest issue is that Topics would be under the control of Google. And which company earns a staggeringly large percentage of its revenue from gathering and using accurate data about internet users? It starts with a “G”, and ends with “oogle”.

Will Topics take over before the cookie crumbles?

It’s too soon to say whether Topics will be acceptable to the ad tech industry as a whole, either in its current form or after significant changes. For now, the best thing to do is to gather as much first-party data as you can from your audience, and keep an eye on this story. Like it or not, Google is a critical player in this space, so marketers of all kinds need to pay attention to how they are constructing the post-cookie world.