For the third time, the new year means new plans for Google as it continues to alter its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome. On Jan. 25, the tech giant introduced a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics that will replace Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) — exactly a year after putting its weight behind the proposal.
While Google promised that FLoC would deliver at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent that advertisers get with cookie-based advertising, many players in the ad world doubted those claims and wondered if FLoC would ever fully take off. Despite those concerns, the replacement of FLoC with Topics represents yet another complication as advertisers continue to figure out what the cookieless future will actually look like.
