The State of Online Privacy Pt4

The Topics API Explainer

This is a series looking at the ways online privacy, particularly tracking, is changing. If you haven’t already, have a read of part 1, 2, and 3.

In a nutshell, FLoC was supposed to group people together in interest-based cohorts to direct ads to. So, if your browser history indicated you’d visited football websites over the last few days, you’d be put into a cohort with other football-website-visitors & you’d all be served football ads.

While this addressed some of the issues presented by third-party cookies (3PC), it presented a host of new problems which largely boils down to the overarching issue: identifying specific people. Each cohort would have an ID and a capacity of a few thousand people, making it easy for interested parties (attackers, ad agencies, etc) to identify the people in the cohorts. Meaning people could still be tracked.

The API will use a combination of different strategies to address the issues presented in FLoC. Mainly looking at making it harder for users to be fingerprinted (and therefore identified);

The Topics API does seem to have given more thought to the issues presented by FLoC and addresses them. However…

Additionally, this API would be on by default so many people will not know they’re consenting to this and although there’s a mechanism for switching it off, that relies on people knowing it’s on in the first place.

Topics API needs to know your browser history in order for it to work. While there has been thought put into how to anonymise people and limit identification, this is a bandaid solution.

The exclusion of “sensitive” topics also poses the question of what is sensitive and who gets to decide? There is no current definition of what API developers mean when they say “sensitive” which further emphasises the subjectiveness of it all. Pregnancy and climate change are both topics that are advertised and could be sensitive to a subset of users, especially those who have had traumatising experiences with either.

There are other, more consent-forward ways to find out what adverts people want to see and when they want to see them, that don’t involve tracking. Contextual advertising is also an option that’s being proposed as an alternative, which basically says: “if I’m on a supermarket website, I don’t mind soap being advertised to me”.

We have to wait and see how the wider privacy community feels about this API but, as it stands, while it is an improvement on FLoC, it still doesn’t address the main problem of 3PC.

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