Google Topics will track your browsing and divvy it up into 300 categories for advertising. It replaces Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).
When you hit upon a site that supports the Topics API for ad purposes, the browser will share three topics you are interested in — one for each of the three last weeks — selected randomly from your top five topics of each week. The site can then share this with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would make for a more private method of deciding which ad to show you — and Google notes that it also provides users with far greater control and transparency than what’s currently the standard. Users will be able to review and remove topics from their lists — and turn off the entire Topics API, too.
Check It Out: Google Topics Will Categorize Your Browsing for Advertising
Andrew:
My first thought when reading this was of the three-man firing squad used in many settings where capital punishment by firing squad is still a thing.
Only one man on the team has a live round, loaded by a third party. No one on the firing team knows who has the live round, and thus knows for certainty that they are the one doing the fatal deed.
As for the recipient, the poor bugger wearing blindfold, it’s irrelevant. He cannot even see who is doing the shooting, and at the end, he’s still just as dead.
The random assignment is of benefit only to the firing line, not to the objective.