Google’s Topics API analyses your browsing history – here’s how to disable it

If you update your Chrome browser, you’ll see the following pop-up message after you restart:

Google has officially rolled out Topics API after over a year of testing. It’s a new method for so-called «interest-based ad targeting». Until now, third-party cookies have been used in Switzerland and the European Union.

They basically both do the same: record your interests and habits so that you can be shown targeted advertising. Ads that should interest you, of course.

How does Google Topics work?

With Topics, Google analyses your browsing history and parses topics on your visited websites. Based on this analysis, Google concludes which topics interest you. Google then categorises the three topics that interest you the most.

For this purpose, the search engine giant has created various categories. For example, Cooking, Vehicles or Movies. Over four weeks, these topics will be assigned to you and passed on. During this time, you’ll be shown advertisements based on these categories. After that, assignments are deleted and a new analysis takes place.

Important for you: the topics that Google selects for you are displayed transparently. You can decide if you like these topics, or if you don’t want them. If you disable them all, random ads will be displayed. You can also block individual subcategories, but allow others – a useful feature, as sometimes Google’s categories aren’t precise. So if you’re interested in new baseball caps, but not fashion in general, you can set this accordingly.

How is this different to third-party cookies?

The biggest difference from the previously used third-party cookies is how data about you is collected – and what data. Topics does its collecting in your browser. Exclusively. In addition, Topics doesn’t store sensitive data such as gender or ethnicity.

Third-party cookies always involve external servers – including those of Google itself. This makes it difficult to control where what data about you is stored and for how long.

Why’s Google doing this?

At first glance, your data appears more secure than before. In exchange, this limits options for advertisers. Google is doing this primarily because of new data protection laws in Europe and individual US states.

However, a certain kind of peer pressure can also be assumed. Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft have all already blocked third-party cookies in various ways. Now Google is simply following suit.

How to block Topics

If you don’t want Topics to collect data on you, you can easily disable the feature. Open your Chrome settings. Then click on Privacy and security. Select Ad privacy.

Now open the three menu options Ad topics, Site-suggested ads and Ad measurement one by one. For all three, click on the switch to make it grey instead of blue. Restart Chrome – Topics-based themes will no longer be collected.

What do these three settings do in detail?

Ad topics analyses your browsing history and suggests matching themes based on it.

Site-suggested ads – depending on your browsing behaviour, advertising topics will be suggested.

Ad measurement – websites and advertisers can measure how their ads are performing. Which ones did you ignore, which ones did you not scroll away from for a while, and which ones did you maybe even click on?