Google reveals the latest attempt to replace cookies

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After delays and missteps, Google is outlining its latest plan for advertising in the Chrome Web browser after the cookie is gone.

The tech giant is now ready to test what it calls topic advertising, an iteration of an experiment it conducted last year, in which it can serve personalized ads on Chrome web browsers to groups of people or cohorts, so the ads don’t take. targeting people.

This happens after he has received the pushback of his previous test of his Federated Learning of Cohorts [FLOC] model, which hid users in anonymity pool. But that solution was found to allow bad actors to use techniques to trace “cohort” data down to personally identifiable information.

Google is experimenting with these targeting techniques to phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2023. Cookies have long been criticized as invasive tracking devices, which collect data on the behavior of people on the Internet without their consent.

Google’s latest cookie replacement has some privacy leaders still concerned that Google may continue to keep an eye on web users. Meanwhile, the ad technology and ad targeting audiences are more concerned that Google’s new limits on data might stifle solid targeting brands use to message consumers.

Instead of FLOC, Google plans to replace cookies by sharing a small sample of topics (interests collected on users as they cross the Internet on Chrome) with websites.

Google will begin the test with about 300 topics of interest, such as fitness and travel, a number that could reach a few thousand, according to Ben Galbraith, product director of Chrome, who on Monday held a conference call with the media to explain the ad targeting experiment. . Google will collect five interests on a user each week, for up to three weeks, then it will expose three interests, one each week, to the websites they visit.

“When you visit a participating website, one topic from these five, from each of the last three weeks, is shared with the site, which may include its advertising partners, which can then be used to display ads that will be the most relevant,” Galbraith said. “And let’s compare this for a moment with cookies, where advertisers track users and profile them to figure out what those topics of interest might be.”

Galbraith said FLOC’s Topics “improves user privacy”. For one, the process exchanges fewer data points. Additionally, FLOC was run by machine learning, and the use of artificial intelligence was an opaque way to classify consumers and their interests. Topics are easier to understand, and consumers can see exactly which topics they fall into and control them, Galbraith said. “The design of Topics was inspired by what we learned from our previous FLOC tests,” said Galbraith, “which included a lot of great feedback from the community and as such Topics replaces our FLOC proposal.”

A Google voice critic, Pete Snyder, director of privacy at competing browser Brave, said Google’s argument proposal fails to solve key privacy issues. Brave, a browser with 50 million monthly users, has avoided Google FLOC tests, preventing it from running on the browser and plans to stay out of experiments on the topics, Snyder said. One of the problems, according to Snyder, is that Google would still collect consumer data.

“The central idea here, the main central concern here, to put it bluntly,” Snyder said, “who is Google to tell me what I think is sensitive about myself?”

Google will restrict subject categories to some clearly sensitive areas, such as racial affinity and sexual orientation, but Snyder said it may not yet cover the full range of people’s privacy preferences.

Google will allow consumers to opt out of topics of interest assigned to their browsers or opt out entirely, Galbraith said.

Meanwhile, others have said that Google’s new proposal doesn’t seem to go far enough for personalized advertising to thrive online. Tal Chalozin, CEO of Innovid, a connected TV advertising and measurement platform, said Chrome Topics appears to be an even less ambitious alternative to FLOC.

“It’s clearly a complete streamlining of FLOC’s grand vision,” said Chalozin, “which was significantly more robust and a broader solution, but it looks like it has received a lot of heat from the industry.”

Mike Woosley, chief operating officer of Lotame, an advertising data and technology company, had similar problems. “Google describes ‘Topics’ as a browser-side utility that will assign a user up to several ‘handful’ of areas of interest that will persist for three weeks,” Woosley told Ad Age via email. “This kind of capability harks back to contextual advertising techniques around 2005. Unfortunately, the technology described would be wholly insufficient for the needs of the vast majority of modern marketers who require detailed personalities to determine the marketing voice, segment customers, measure brand affinity and optimize marketing for complex products such as highly detailed segmented insurance. “

Google is trying to catch up with other web browsers and device companies, such as Apple, which disabled third-party cookies in Safari in 2020. In addition, there have been more regulations in Europe and the United States, which have cracked down on the programmatic advertising tactics that rely on sharing data without people’s permission.

Google is the largest advertising company on the Internet, serving ads to millions of websites using its advertising network. Google also makes Android devices, the Chrome browser, and owns popular platforms like YouTube and search. This powerful stance improves control whenever the way its advertising platform works changes, which explains the long timeline for phasing out third-party cookies. On Monday, Galbraith said Google still intends to delete third-party cookies by the end of 2023 expected.

Third-party cookies have been a particularly difficult problem for Google, because it also relies on them to target ads within its advertising platform. There were antitrust concerns that Google might take advantage of blocking third-party cookies. The fear was that Google might exclude competitors from the advertising equation, while it was still on top of all the data coming from Chrome to still effectively target ads within its platform.

These concerns were partly why Google redesigned its plans. Last year, Google delayed the withdrawal of third-party cookies from 2021 to 2023 and assured European regulators that its advertising platform would operate with the same data restrictions as competitors.

On Monday, Galbraith highlighted Google’s commitment to the UK’s Competitions and Market Authority. “We will not prefer our advertising business,” said Galbraith.

Google has just started testing topic-based ad targeting and is looking for ad technology companies, browsers, and brands to put into its software to try it out. Google discovered a number of flaws with the original FLOC proposal when it entered the trial phase last year. It was found that other companies in the ecosystem could access enough data in FLOC to discover the interests of individual consumers, through a tactic known as “fingerprinting”. Fingerprinting is when a data or advertising technology company has the ability to read the settings on a person’s device to identify who they are and when that person visits another website or returns to a website, it can be better targeted. with ads.

Google said the Topics advertising platform would limit the ability to fingerprint consumers. It’s not that fingerprinting is impossible, but Google’s hope is that with fewer data points, there are fewer signals for outside companies to hook to to locate the end user.

Brave’s Snyder said the topic experiment appeared to be a rebranding of FLOC with few significant changes. “The topics are no different from the cohorts,” Snyder said. “You’re still grouping people into a small number of buckets, or should I say a large number of buckets.”

Chalozin said the biggest problem with Google’s proposals, so far, is that while topics may solve ad targeting, brands and ad companies need better measurement and attribution fixes. As the web becomes more anonymous, it becomes harder for brands to follow when the ads have been seen by consumers and when those ads have been acted upon. “You want to go back to see the ads that led someone to put something in their cart,” Chalozin said.

Galbraith said Google is still working on measurement and attribution in its larger experiments within its so-called Privacy Sandbox, of which topic targeting is only one aspect.

Sara Stevens, vice president of digital capabilities at Epsilon, the data company owned by Publicis, said the entire industry has already adapted to cookie-free ad targeting by creating new tools for Apple’s Safari web browser. Brands are partnering with companies like Epsilon to connect consumer data points and target ads via alternative identifiers.

“It’s good that Google has returned to the drawing board,” Stevens said. “They remain true to their desire to adhere to user privacy, but the devil is in the details. So let the test begin. “

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