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

Hello TAG, thank you for continuing to review and we appreciate the dialogue. Your response to this proposal, and the related responses from WebKit and Mozilla, make it clear that without changes or new information, Topics in its current form is not likely to gain multi-browser support or progress along the W3C standards track.  In the long term, the Privacy Sandbox effort aims to converge with other browsers on APIs that we all agree are appropriate for the Web and useful for online advertising without cross-site tracking.

In the near term, however, Chrome is unable to remove third-party cookies (expected in 2024) without making some privacy-improving replacement technologies available.  The Topics API will remain part of the collection of APIs that we expect the ads ecosystem to test during 2023 — and we hope the testing feedback we hear and the implementer experience we gain will be valuable contributions in future work towards cross-browser standards work in this space, however long that takes.

Regarding your comments on the current state of the API, we have some responses and some disagreements, and we would be happy to continue the conversation.  Your ideas for iteratively improving the current API will be welcome, if you wish to provide them, even if our need to balance multiple interests prevents us from adopting your recommendations wholesale. We do appreciate the feedback and will always look to it for elements we could incorporate in the meantime.  We would be particularly interested in any thoughts on how to modify our API now to ease a transition to a standards approach for interest-based advertising in the future, although it may be too early for this to be a relevant design question.

We understand the TAG is busy, and perhaps you are not interested in further review or discussion on this proposal until its status materially changes (e.g. we gain multi-implementer support, we get new data on utility from ad ecosystem testing, adoption of TEE processing changes the privacy infrastructure landscape, etc). If that is the case, we look forward to picking up a version of this discussion again in the future, likely sometime after Chrome has removed 3rd-party cookies.

Alternatively, if you want to continue discussion on the details of your review, we are happy to make the case for why we continue to feel that replacing 3rd-party cookies with Topics is a tremendous step forward in web privacy despite its trade-offs.


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