![]() The value "1" refers to "/Arts & Entertainment" while the number 277 refers to "/Jobs & Education/Education/Foreign Language Study."Īrmed with that information, webpage code could then request a topic-related ad, which ideally would better engage the web visitor and generate more revenue because the advertiser would pay a premium to reach the desired audience. …where "Number" corresponds to a numbered taxonomy of predefined interests. In browsers supporting Topics, like the upcoming Chrome 115, a webpage invoking the API thus… const topics = await document.browsingTopics() The API occasionally may also return a random topic. When you visit a participating site, Topics picks just three topics, one topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners." Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers. "Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted. "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," explained Vinay Goel, product director of Privacy Sandbox at Google, last year. That allows the site to show an ad believed to be relevant to the visitor's known interests. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |