The tech giant has declared its intent to experiment in its “Privacy Sandbox”.
Google is preparing another round of tests for the latest iteration of its purportedly private-preserving ad technology, according to a report in The Register. This comes after after last year’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) experiment revealed the need for further refinement.
In separate messages to Chromium developers declaring their “Intent to Experiment,” Google software developers on Friday said Origin Trials for the company’s FLEDGE API and its Topics API will commence following the March 31 debut of Chrome 101 Beta. Testing should continue at least until Chrome 104 Beta, three months hence.
FLEDGE, for First “Locally-Executed Decision over Groups” Experiment, aims to enable remarketing. It shows ads at a website based on prior interactions at a different website – and Topics, which replaces FLoC, aims to enable interest-based advertising. And both aspire to do so in a way that doesn’t involve tracking individuals across the web, or so it’s said.
Ad-serving decisions will move from the server to the browser for privacy
FLEDGE is an effort to implement Turtledove, an API to facilitate advertising targeted at interest groups. It moves interest data and the decision about which ad to present from the server-side to the client-side (browser), for the sake of privacy.
“The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in,” Google says.
Google’s explainer for FLEDGE/Turtledove says that the in-browser ad scheme “involves the browser running untrusted JavaScript downloaded from multiple parties” and outlines various ways in which the API imposes limitations on the execution environment for the sake of security.
“Anyone with a concern for a truly privacy-first Web should be concerned with Fledge and Topics API,” said Snyder in an email to The Register. “Google is trying to track the web on a course that still favors their infrastructure and advantages, before others can nudge things on a more user-focused approach.”
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