The privacy sandbox is a game-changing initiative to improve web privacy for users, while also giving publishers, creators and other developers the tools they need to build thriving businesses.
The tools which the privacy sandbox affords will ensure a safe and healthy web for all.
Moreover, we all know the importance of advertising for many businesses and the privacy sandbox is a key way to support access to free content online.
Cognisant to the Sandbox’s importance, Google has just announced Topics, a new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising.
With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel and Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week, based on your browsing history.
Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted.
Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers.
Also, when you visit a participating site, Topics only picks three topics.
One topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with advertising partners.
Therefore, Topics rather boldly enables browsers to give you meaningful transparency and control over your data.
As part of these fantastic innovations, in Chrome, Google is currently building user controls that let you see the topics.
Should users not like the topics they can remove ones they don’t like or disable the feature completely.
It would be prudent to exclude that topics have been curated to exclude sensitive categories, such as gender or race.
Since Topics is powered by the browser, it provides you with a more recognisable way to see and control how your data is shared, compared to tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies.
Furthermore, by providing websites with your topics of interest, online businesses are given an alternative to covert tracking techniques.
Example Illustration
Example illustrations of what users can see about 3rd party cookies (left) vs Topics (right). In Chrome, Google plans to make Topics easier to understand and manage for users.
