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Google has disabled live traffic data from being displayed on its Maps app in Ukraine.

The app displays this information by collecting anonymous data from Android smartphones, which shows how busy roads and different places are.

But it has now been switched off in the region temporarily to protect users.

Google confirmed the move to the BBC, having told Reuters it took the action for the safety of local communities, after consulting regional authorities.

Although traffic data has been disabled, normal maps navigation features are still functioning properly in the area.

Data like this has long been used by people involved in desktop detection surrounding significant events.

Open-source intelligence
OSINT, or open-source intelligence, involves ordinary people using data available online, such as information about traffic or satellite images, to piece together a picture of what’s happening on the ground.

For instance, live traffic data on Google Maps is updated as a result of smartphones sending anonymised location information to Google. If lots of phone signals seem to be slow-moving or stationary (because of being stuck in traffic) the app updates to indicate roads are congested.

Benjamin Strick, director of investigations for the Centre for Information Resilience, told the BBC that while this information is useful, it’s not giving us the full picture.

“It can be useful in verifying content to answer integral questions such as where something was filmed, where it happened, when it happened, and what’s in it,” he said.

“But sometimes that can be a little risky with misinterpretation.

“Some people might see a line of light on radar imagery, and assume it’s a traffic build-up. We’ve seen this online where people look at past imagery – and I’ve noticed that, actually, it’s just power lines.

“So that’s really tricky, because it can create headlines. It’s really important to just double-verify everything and question everything.”

Could phone signals show secret troop movements?
No and yes.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, open-source researchers have been poring over data from a variety of sources in an effort to better understand events as they unfold.

It’s unlikely that traffic data in Ukraine is being generated by mobile phones carried by military personnel though.

On 24 February, an open-source intelligence researcher in the United States combined satellite radar images and Google Maps traffic jam data from the Ukrainian border and concluded that the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces had begun.

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View original tweet on Twitter
But Mr Strick explained that data showing heavy traffic build-up around cities could be explained by civilians, rather than armed forces.

“People might post that on Twitter, claiming that there might be a lot of Russian vehicles there,” he said.

“But that could also be people fleeing out of the area. It could be an old highway road that has never had a car for the past few months, and suddenly has three vehicles travelling in one direction.

“It doesn’t really mean it’s going to be similar to what you would see in the middle of New York City with a traffic build-up.”

What about keeping evacuees safe?
As data is provided in real-time, there is a question mark surrounding how to keep people in Ukraine safe while sharing intelligence online.

Google switching off live traffic data for Ukraine clearly helps with this, but Mr Strick says there are “a huge amount of risks” surrounding keeping people safe.

“Anyone can learn how to look at a video and see where someone is filming from, or what direction a person might be travelling. What we’ve really been trying to do is establish some ethics around that,” he said.

“There’s a bit of a game out there now, to geolocate things as quickly as possible and identify those locations. That’s a big concern at the moment.”

Valve’s new handheld PC, the Steam Deck, has officially been released – but only to a select few people.

The hardware was originally slated for release in December 2021, but was pushed back due to supply chain issues.

Despite the hardware having been released, many orders are only available “after Q2 2022”.

When asked if it would be able to fulfil these pre-orders, Valve president Gabe Newell pointed to unexpected high demand.

“The shortages are not due to supply shock, they’re due to a demand shock,” he said.

“It’s just this huge uptake in silicon consumption that caught everybody more or less flat-footed.”

On Friday, Valve started contacting people who pre-ordered Steam Decks on a first-come, first-served basis.

Customers have three days from receipt of the email from Valve to complete their purchase or lose their spot in the queue.

It is unclear when customers will receive their hardware, but Valve said it will begin shipping on 28 February.

The base version of the Steam Deck costs £349 and comes with 64GB flash storage, while the top-end version costs £569 and has 512GB of faster internal storage.

A big library of games
One of the clear selling points of the Steam Deck is its vast library of more than 62,000 games, with many titles playable in some form or another.

Greg Coomer, a designer at Valve, said this library was at the heart of the product’s inception.

“Our goal was to bring all the games on Steam to a handheld form factor, to be able to play even the triple A games in the library,” he said.

Unlike buying a new console, players who have accrued hundreds of PC games over their life will find many of them are immediately playable on the Steam Deck.

One section on the home screen will show you just how many of the games you own are considered to be “Great on Deck”, meaning the games fully support the hardware.

But this is not foolproof, as we experienced severe stuttering and slowdown in one of the selected games, the 2011 title Sonic Generations.

Meanwhile, many older titles are playable with issues. For example, Persona 4 Golden runs well on the handheld – as you would expect of a game originally released on PlayStation 2 and remastered for Sony’s handheld PlayStation Vita. However, it currently does not play audio during cut scenes, and has extended black screen delays exiting battles.

Despite having limited internal storage space, all versions of the Steam Deck are expandable by a MicroSD card. Mr Coomer said the hardware would not only support a 1TB MicroSD card, but he believed it would support any size that exists.

The Internals
A feature of the handheld is its battery life. Valve says it can hold charge for up to eight hours depending on use, although we were unable to find a game which ran for this length of time on default settings.

The battery time varies from game to game, with hit title Grand Theft Auto V lasting just under five hours with default graphics settings.

How a selection of games fared with battery life on default settings:

Control (2019) – three hours
Skyrim: Special Edition (2011, Special Edition released 2016) – four hours
Sims 4 (2014) – four hours
Persona 4: Golden (2012, PC version released 2020) – six hours
Fallout: New Vegas (2010) – six hours
According to Mr Coomer, parts of the Steam Deck – such as the battery – are “technically upgradeable”, while other parts are replaceable if players have an issue.

“But there’s a limit,” he said. “For example, it’s really hard to get the battery out if you need to replace that.

“You can upgrade parts, you can swap parts. Some parts are easier to swap than others. Mostly we don’t recommend that anyone do that themselves at home if they’re not already a pro at doing those kinds of things.”

Valve has said in the past it is “technically possible” the Steam Deck will support an external VR headset, but it is not optimised for it. And Mr Coomer would not elaborate on which VR games would run on the device.

“We have tried it out only just to vet whether some of the peripherals will light up,” he said. “We knew from the outset that we’re not going to have a fantastic experience with VR games running on Deck today.”

The Future
Valve has released several products in the hardware realm in the past, such as its 2015 Steam Machines.

The prebuilt gaming PCs were intended to compete with home consoles such as the Xbox and PlayStation, but were quietly removed from the Steam store in 2018, and are no longer available for sale.

It also released the Steam Controller and Steam Link, which Mr Newell points out are still supported despite being discontinued.

“All of those things have continued to be the building blocks for what we’re doing with Deck,” he said. “I think Deck is going to be an enormously popular product.

“We’d expect customers to be excited their Steam library is going to work on their desktop, even if they stop using their Deck. That’s a big advantage.”

He called the Steam Deck “the first stage of the next generation”.

“I’m playing Final Fantasy XIV on my Deck,” he said. “That’s something that traditionally would have been absurd.

“You’re not going to play that on your phone, right? It would be impossible that you throw away everything that makes it a fun game in order to get it to run in that kind of environment.”

And he said Valve isn’t too concerned about big sales figures, comparing the hardware to its 2020 VR release Half-Life: Alyx.

“Was Alyx a huge financial success? No,” he said. “Because the number of devices where you can play it is a vast subset of the number of PC titles.

“Does that mean in any way, shape, or form that we’re disappointed with Alyx? Not at all, because we’re in this for the long haul.

“Our view is, narrowly viewing everything in terms of strict unit volumes precludes a lot of interesting choices.”

The Steam Deck seems destined to be compared to the wildly popular Nintendo Switch, which has surpassed 100 million sales worldwide.

But from a consumer’s point of view, the handheld PC does offer something dramatically different – every single game that can be purchased on the Steam Deck remains in your Steam library to be played in the future long after the hardware no longer functions.

So perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Steam Deck that separates it from other consoles is not just that it already has a vast library – it’s that its library will live on.

Russia has limited access to Facebook over the platform’s stance on the accounts of several Moscow-backed news outlets amid the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor accused the network of “censorship” and violating “the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens”.

Facebook said it had refused to stop fact-checking and labelling content from state-owned news organisations.

The move came a day after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.

It is unclear what the regulator restrictions mean, or to what extent Facebook’s parent company Meta’s other platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram – are affected.

The regulator had demanded Facebook lift the restrictions it placed on Thursday on state news agency RIA, state TV channel Zvezda, and pro-Kremlin news sites Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru.

It said that Meta had “ignored” these requests.

Sir Nick Clegg, vice-president of global affairs at Meta, said Russian authorities “ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labelling” the outlets’ content.

“We refused,” he said.

But he made clear he wanted Russians to continue to use Meta’s platforms.

“Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organise for action”, Sir Nick said, and the company wants “them to continue to make their voices heard”.

Many state-owned media outlets in Russia have painted a largely positive picture of Russian military advances in Ukraine, calling the invasion a “special military operation” that had been forced on Moscow.

On Thursday Meta said it had set up a “special operations centre” to monitor content about the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia has its own Facebook equivalents, VK and Odnoklassniki, but Facebook is also popular in the country – as is Meta-owned Instagram.

On Friday, US Senator Mark Warner said Facebook, YouTube and other social media services had “a clear responsibility to ensure that your products are not used to facilitate human rights abuses”.

Meta, has been under pressure to label misinformation – and has been working with outside fact-checkers, including Reuters.

Moscow has also increased pressure on domestic media, threatening to block reports that contain what it describes as “false information” regarding its invasion of Ukraine.

Twitter also told the BBC that its safety and integrity teams were “disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information and to advance the speed and scale of our enforcement”.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled several ambitious artificial-intelligence projects, describing AI as “the key to unlocking the Metaverse”.

In a livestreamed demonstration, he created a basic virtual world – including an island, trees and a beach – using the AI feature Builder Bot.

Mr Zuckerberg also announced a plan to build a universal speech translator.

“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language is a superpower that was dreamt of forever,” he said.

Builder Bot was part of Meta’s CAIRaoke project to improve AI assistants and allow “AI to see the world from our experience” as people entered virtual reality via headsets or glasses, Mr Zuckerberg said.

And he promised the AI systems driving Meta’s virtual worlds would preserve privacy and be transparent and responsible.

Facebook has been investing in AI for the past 10 years and has one of the world’s leading experts, Yann LeCun as its head of AI.

In January it announced that it had built a new AI supercomputer that it aims to be the fastest in the world when completed in mid 2022.

Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta in October, following revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen.

At the time, Mr Zuckerberg talked of a wide-ranging Metaverse – accessible via VR headsets, such as the Meta Quest, formerly Oculus -where people could work, play and chat.

And Meta plans to hire 10,000 people in Europe to help build it.

There has been much hype of its potential.

But critics have asked whether big corporations should be allowed to dominate the creation of such worlds – and how safe users would be.

‘Unwanted interactions’
One of Facebook’s earliest investors, Roger McNamee, told BBC News the company should be prevented from creating a “dystopian” Metaverse, given how its social network had failed to keep user data private or avoid misinformation and hate speech.

Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth admitted the Metaverse would be much harder to moderate than existing digital platforms, especially given its long-term goal of lots of companies interacting in the same space.

But he promised to allow users to control the experience.

And following reports women felt harassed in Meta VR platform Horizon Worlds, the company hastily introduced a feature called Personal Boundary to protect avatars from “unwanted interactions”.

A cyber rapid-response team (CRRT) is being deployed across Europe, after a call for help from Ukraine.

The newly formed team of eight to 12 experts, from Lithuania, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Romania, and the Netherlands, has committed to help defend Ukraine from cyber-attacks – remotely and on site in the country.

An official warned attacks were likely.

“We can see that cyber-measures are an important part of Russia’s hybrid toolkit,” the CRRT official said.

It comes after the UK and the US blamed Russia for cyber-attacks earlier this month that temporarily took a small number of Ukrainian banking and government websites offline.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Defence tweeted: “In response to Ukraine request, [we] are activating [a] Lithuanian-led cyber rapid-response team, which will help Ukrainian institutions to cope with growing cyber-threats. #StandWithUkraine.”

CRRTs are a European Union initiative to deepen defence and co-operation between member states.

They are said to be equipped with commonly developed cyber-toolkits designed to detect, recognise and mitigate cyber-threats.

An official said the team was “composed of different cyber-expertise, such as incident response, forensics, vulnerability assessment, to be able to react to a variety of scenarios”.

Russia has previously been accused of so-called hybrid warfare, combining cyber-attacks with traditional military activity, in Georgia and Crimea.

The EU and Ukraine blamed Russia after thousands of people in multiple cities in Ukraine experienced power cuts, in 2015 and 2016, when hackers temporarily shut off electricity substations.

The US, UK and EU also blamed it for the hugely disruptive NotPetya wiper attack.

Experts say about 2,000 NotPetya attacks were launched in 2017, mainly aimed at Ukraine but the malicious software spread globally, causing billions of dollars of damage to computer systems across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Moscow denies being behind the attack, calling such claims “Russophobic”.

Donald Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, has launched, in a limited form, on the US Apple App Store.

The app had similarities to Twitter, commentators noted – Mr Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube last year.

And some early users had difficulties registering accounts.

Project lead and former congressman Devin Nunes said it was expected to be fully operational by the end of March.

Some of those trying to register had been told: “Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist,” the Reuters news agency reported.

Created by the year-old Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), Truth Social had previously been made available to about 500 beta testers.

Last week, Donald Trump Jr shared a screenshot of his father’s first “truth” on the social network: “Get ready. Your favourite president will see you soon.”

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Truth Social has already had one update for “bug fixes”, according to the App Store, and is now on version 1.0.1.

Last autumn, pranksters discovered a test version of the app website and, according to the Washington Post, adopted the username donaldjtrump.

Twitter banned the former president following the 6 January 2021 US Capitol riot, saying he had broken its rules on the glorification of violence.

And commentators have highlighted, among other things, Truth Social buttons that resemble those relating to Twitter’s reply, retweet and “like” functions.

Big tech
On its website, Truth Social describes itself as a “‘big tent’ social-media platform that encourages an open, free and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology”.

Mr Trump wants Truth Social to champion “free speech” and eschew the “censorship” of sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

It is a common view among conservatives Silicon Valley social-media companies are curtailing free speech by removing posts and users.

“We cannot use any of the big tech companies,” Mr Nunes, who resigned from Congress in December to become TMTG’s chief executive, told the conservative Newsmax network.

“So we’re having to build this from scratch.”

Frozen out
Mr Nunes has vowed Truth Social will be a “censorship-free experience”.

But any social-media platform on the App Store, and Google Play, has to remove content that breaks the rules.

And a truly uncensored platform would soon be frozen out.

At his zenith on Twitter, Mr Trump had more than 88 million followers.

But none of the other alternative platforms presenting themselves as censorship free, such as Gettr, Parler, Gab and Rumble, has attracted audiences comparable to those of the big social networks.

Companies such as Twitter “have had years to develop their platforms and build their audiences”, points out Darrell West, a senior technology innovation fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“I just think he’s going to discover it’s a lot harder than he realises,” he said.

“If this were easy, I think he would have done this six months ago.”

‘Very difficult’
Last year, Apple and Google removed Parler from their stores, for failing to take down posts they said threatened violence and contained illegal activity.

It was allowed back but only once it had agreed to Apple and Google’s terms of service.

“There simply is no way to avoid big tech,” Mr West says.

“Even if he has his own platform, if he’s violating their terms of service, they could basically push his app out of their app store, which would make it very difficult for him to build an audience.”

‘People worry’
Gettr, which also advocates “free speech” and looks like Twitter, was founded last year by Mr Trump’s former adviser and spokesman Jason Miller.

“It’s not like there’s the dummies’ guide to creating a social-media platform,” he told BBC News.

“You’ve got to find good talent.

“And quite frankly, there are a lot of people who are just scared… because people worry what it’s going to be like if I have something on my resume that challenges one of the big tech companies.”

Truth Social will also have to be robust enough to repel hackers.

“We have so many people who don’t want to see us be successful… even foreign governments and other bad actors,” Mr Nunes said.

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are voting again on whether to join a union.

It follows a ruling from the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), that Amazon had interfered with the previous election.

More than 6,000 workers are eligible to vote to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

Workers have until March 25 to vote, and results will be counted at the end of March.

Two other Amazon warehouses in Staten Island are also preparing to hold elections.

‘Objectionable behaviour’
The first election in Bessemer attracted worldwide attention, as it would have been Amazon’s first US union.

But workers at the BHM1 warehouse in Alabama rejected a move to unionise, by a margin of two to one.

As the new vote got under way, the RWDSU said: “Workers’ voices can and must be heard fairly, unencumbered by Amazon’s limitless power to control what must be a fair and free election.”

The NLRB ordered the new election in November.

Its report into how the election had been conducted found that Amazon had:

held meetings six days a week, 18 hours a day, intended to dissuade workers from joining a union
employed private paid consultants to attend these meetings
used text messages and written flyers on bathroom walls and television screens, to dissuade workers
installed a box for voting within view of multiple video surveillance cameras – which gave the impression that it was the official polling location – which Amazon controlled, and had knowledge of who participated
The RWDSU added: “We are deeply concerned that the decision fails to adequately prevent Amazon from continuing its objectionable behaviour in a new election.”

Algorithm decisions
In response Amazon said: “Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU last year. We look forward to our team in BHM1 having their voices heard again.”

Union membership in the US is low – just 6.3% of the private sector workforce, according to the US Department of Labour.

Amazon workers in Japan, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Poland are unionised. Issues which the unions representing them look into include work-rate demands, injuries and the increasing use of algorithms in deciding how workers perform.

The US government is investigating reports of Tesla cars braking unexpectedly on motorways.

The so-called “phantom braking” problem is being looked at by US regulator the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

It received 354 complaints in the past nine months and its investigation will cover approximately 416,000 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles from 2021-22.

Drivers say the issue occurs using the Autopilot driver assistance system.

The feature gives the vehicle control over some elements of braking and steering when driving, although it is not a substitute for a human driver.

Despite the name, Tesla recommends drivers remain vigilant and supervise their vehicle, noting the Autopilot ADAS system “does not make the vehicle autonomous”.

Tesla is currently under investigation by the NHTSA over two other matters.

In December 2021, it disabled its Passenger Play feature that allowed games to be played on its touchscreen while the car is in motion, leading to an open investigation covering an estimated 580,000 vehicles.

And last August, the NHTSA started to look into the role of the Autopilot system in 11 crashes involving emergency vehicles, covering approximately 765,000 Tesla cars.

The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has begun a “preliminary evaluation” into Tesla over the complaints. This is the stage before the agency could officially issue a recall of the vehicles.

It says there have been no crashes, injuries or fatalities as a result of the incidents.

“The complaints allege that while utilising the ADAS features including adaptive cruise control, the vehicle unexpectedly applies its brakes while driving at highway speeds,” the report says.

“Complainants report that the rapid deceleration can occur without warning, at random, and often repeatedly in a single drive cycle.

“ODI is opening this preliminary evaluation to determine the scope and severity of the potential problem and to fully assess the potential safety-related issues.”

The NHTSA makes customer complaints publicly available on its website, so consumers can compare vehicle safety.

In one complaint from 11 February 2022, the driver says: “Heavy braking occurs for no apparent reason and with no warning, resulting in several near misses for rear end collisions… this issue has occurred dozens of times during my five months and 10,000-mile ownership.”

In another dated 3 February 2022, the user complains of “phantom braking for no apparent reason”, stating that their car suddenly decelerated from 73mph down to 59mph “in two seconds”.

The BBC has approached Tesla for comment.

Investors are being urged to vote against a $99m (£73m) pay package awarded to Apple boss Tim Cook last year.

Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) said it has “significant concerns” over the size of the award, up from $14.8m the year before.

Mr Cook, whose net worth is reportedly more than £1bn, received the pay in shares, salary, and for other costs.

The BBC has contacted Apple for comment.

In a letter to shareholders, the ISS said there are “significant concerns” over the “design and magnitude” of the package. “Half of the award lacks performance criteria,” ISS said.

Mr Cook, 61, who has often spoken publicly about his concerns over equality and human rights issues, said in 2015 that he would give away his entire fortune before he dies.

According to ISS, Mr Cook’s pay was 1,447 times more than the wage of an average Apple employee.

His package included $630,600 in personal security costs and $712,500 for personal use of a private jet. ISS said the cost of such perks “significantly exceeded” comparable companies last year.

Last year, a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing showed that Mr Cook donated almost £7.4m worth of Apple shares to charity, without naming the recipient.

The company behind the iPhone, iPad and MacBook became the first company to hit a $3tn (£2.2tn) stock market value in January before dipping to its current value of $2.8tn (£2.1tn).

Shareholder returns are now more than 1,000% since Mr Cook took over in 2011.

Apple is due to hold its annual meeting for shareholders in the first week of March. However, shareholder votes are only advisory, while Apple’s board decide on pay packages.

At last year’s meeting, 95% of shareholder votes supported Apple’s executive compensation programme.

Growing opposition
Companies in the US, and UK, are facing stronger shareholder opposition over pay and compensation.

General Electric, IBM and Starbucks failed to win a majority of shareholder backing for executive pay in 2021. US oil firms ExxonMobil and Chevron also saw shareholder revolts from climate activists last year.

Millionaires ask to pay more tax
Asset manager Blackrock, Exxon’s second largest shareholder, doubled its votes against executive pay proposals in the Americas in early 2021, compared to 2020.

In the UK, more than twice as many FTSE 100 companies faced shareholder revolts than in 2020, condemning executive pay-outs when many employees faced added financial hardships in the pandemic.

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have called for higher taxes on the billionaires and big business to help pay for a major social spending package. The proposal would raise about $16bn by limiting deductions for executive compensation.

The tax hike plan would pay for federally funded paid family leave, expanded education budgets and climate change problems.

Google’s plan to limit data tracking on its Chrome browser has been extended to cover apps on its Android-based smartphones.

Its so-called Privacy Sandbox project aims to curb the amount of user data that advertisers can gather.

Rival Apple now forces app developers to ask permission from users before tracking them.

The news will be a blow to firms like Meta, which rely on putting their code on apps to track consumer behaviour.

Meta said this month that Apple’s changes would cost it $10bn (£7.3bn) this year. Google’s Android operating system is used by about 85% of smartphone owners worldwide.

No detail
Third-party cookies, which use people’s browsing history to target adverts, will be phased out on Google’s Chrome browser by 2023.

In a blog, Google said it was now extending what it calls its Privacy Sandbox to Android apps, and working on solutions that will limit sharing users’ data and “operate without cross app identifiers, including advertising ID”.

These identifiers are tied to smartphones and are used by apps to collect information. Google said that it will keep them in place for at least two years, while it works “with the industry” on a new system.

“We’re also exploring technologies that reduce the potential for covert data collection, including safer ways for apps to integrate with advertising SDK (software developer kits),” it added.

The tech giant did not detail how it plans to do this.

Apple decided in April last year that app developers had to explicitly ask for permission from users to use IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). Data from advertising company Flurry Analytics, and published by Apple, suggests that US users are choosing to opt out of tracking 96% of the time.

Google’s blog did not name Apple, but referred instead to “other platforms” which it said “have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers”.

“We believe that – without first providing a privacy-preserving alternative path – such approaches can be ineffective,” it added.

Google, unlike Apple, relies on advertising revenue.

Google’s attempts to create alternatives to third party cookies on its Chrome browser have not gone entirely smoothly.

Its first proposal -a system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (Floc) – was disliked by privacy campaigners and advertisers alike.

Floc aimed to disguise users’ individual identities by assigning them to a group with similar browsing histories.

Real-time bidding
Its successor, Topics, was announced recently and aims instead to group users in topic clusters selected out of about 350 categories such as fitness or travel. When someone visits a website, Topics will show the site and its advertising partners three of their interests from the previous three weeks.

The Competitions Market Authority has been scrutinising Google’s transition to more privacy-focused systems and said of its plans to extend them to Android apps: “We will continue to monitor this closely and engage with Google on the nature and detail of its proposals.”

The average app includes at least six third-party trackers that are there solely to collect and share online data, according to a report commissioned by Apple last year.

And any one data broker is estimated to have data on up to 700 million consumers, according to research firm Cracked Lab.

Regulators, such as the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, are investigating the advertising ecosystem, especially the way ads are sold – known as real-time bidding – which automatically places billions of online adverts on web pages and apps every day.