What is Topics?

The Privacy Sandbox initiative aims to create technologies that both preserve people’s privacy online and give companies and developers the tools to build thriving digital businesses, which keeps the web and apps open and accessible to everyone. The Privacy Sandbox is an ongoing initiative that combines ideas from across the industry into new proposals that are tested, commented on, and iterated. One of the Privacy Sandbox proposals that is being tested in Chrome is called Topics. As browsers phase out third-party cookies, advertisers need new ways of reaching customers with relevant ads, and Topics proposes a new, privacy-preserving way of doing just that. With the Topics API, a user’s browser would infer topics (such as "Country Music," "Make-Up & Cosmetics," or "Vegetarian Cuisine") for a user based on their browsing activity during a period of time known as an epoch, currently proposed to be one week. The topic selected for each epoch would be randomly selected from the user's top five topics for that time period.