With the Topics API (part of Privacy Sandbox), Google wants to bring the successor of the classic advertising cookie into the market. Now that the end of the third-party cookie in the Chrome browser has been postponed again (as of January 2022, this will probably be implemented in mid-2024), it shows how important a functioning tool for targeted advertising is – especially for the Internet giant Google.
Topics is intended to create an interest profile based on the pages visited – advertisers can then query these interests via the API interface, without specific reference to a website visited.
The Technical Architecture Group of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) sees some concerns about the Topics API, among them the criticism that the user has too little control over the collected data and cannot understand how his interest profile is created.
Fragmentation of the browser landscape is also a concern of the W3C – after both WebKit and Mozilla currently refuse to include the Topics API in their browser engines. In the worst case, this could lead to certain websites restricting their offers to Chromium-based browsers in order to use the Topics API.
Targeted advertising, user tracking, and performance data collection are paramount for online campaigns. So it’s quite clear that the search for a cookie successor is in full swing – but there are already alternatives that take data protection into account and work reliably.
