Paresh Dave

(Reuters) – Alphabet (NASDAQ) Inc’s Google announced Tuesday its second attempt at allowing advertisers to purchase ads based upon users’ browsing habits without having to rely solely on “privacy-invasive” tracking cookies.

Google intends to ban tracking cookies within its Chrome browser by next year. This will prevent advertisers from monitoring the websites that someone visits. All parties concerned, including website owners, privacy groups and advertisers have voiced concern about this planned transition. This has led to antitrust officials in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries, taking a close look at Google’s plans.

Both online ad sellers and buyers are looking for alternatives to cookies. You have the option of tracking visitors by asking them for email addresses in order to visit websites. Or, you could adopt new technologies from Google, Mozilla or other browser manufacturers.

Google’s first solution, Federated Learning of Cohorts (or FLoC), aimed to group individuals into large baskets that are based on what websites they visited during the week. Although advertisers could display ads for a particular basket they might not be able to identify the people in that basket or their common interests.

According to Vinay Goel, Google’s product director, FLoC was less efficient than cookies in targeting users. The system also had the potential of exposing browsing histories, Vinay Goel explained to Reuters.

The loss of cookies could lead to companies operating in the online advertising sector worth $250 billion (NASDAQ:). This is due to the large number of users.

Topics, the new browser system is designed to group users into up to 15 baskets. These are based upon three weeks of browsing. As they make their decision whether to display an advertisement to that user, advertisers will be able to see as many as three baskets.

Goel explained that only websites with Topics allow browsing to be recorded. The user can also dissociate himself from any topic, or switch off all the technology. According to Goel, testing will be completed within a few months.