Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Early design review for the Topics API (Issue #726)

Thanks for the question. The API will return an empty response if: the user opts out, the user cleared relevant history, the user is incognito mode, the user is new, the user is signed into Chrome in a child account, etc. As you can see, there are many reasons for which the user may have an empty response, meaning that it is not a clear signal of the user's state. Requiring that a user have topics would negatively impact a significant fraction of the site's traffic.

There are two reasons for returning an empty list instead of a random value. One is that it's much more understandable to the user that when the API is disabled/incognito/etc that the API is not sending anything about them (random or not). Second, the number of cases in which no topics are sent is not small. If we were to send random responses in those cases the signal to noise ratio would be significantly impacted.

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