The Vice President of Google overseeing the Privacy Sandbox project has announced the halt of development and the removal of certain technologies from Chrome and Android that were aimed at balancing user privacy needs with the desires of advertising networks and websites to track visitor preferences. Most of the APIs developed by the Privacy Sandbox were intended to replace third-party cookies, which were planned to be phased out in Chrome.
Originally, the blocking of third-party cookies was set to be implemented by 2022, but the rollout was postponed year after year due to industry resistance and low adoption levels of the technologies developed to replace cookie-based user tracking methods. Earlier this year, Google decided to abandon this initiative and maintain the current approach. Now, six months later, it has also been decided to discontinue the promotion of many APIs and technologies developed to enhance privacy and enable ad delivery without identifying users through third-party cookies.
APIs and technologies whose support will be discontinued:
- IP Protection — allows users' IP addresses to be hidden from website owners by routing traffic not directly, but through a chain of proxy servers. When IP Protection is enabled, the target server sees only the proxy address as the incoming IP, similar to the use of VPN.
- API Topics (which replaced API FLoC) — provides the ability to identify categories of user interests that can be used to segment groups of users with similar interests without identifying individual users through tracking cookies. Interests are calculated based on the user's activity in the browser and are stored on the user's device. Using the API Topics, the ad network can obtain general information about individual interests without having information on the specific activity of the user.
- API Attribution Reporting allows evaluating advertising performance metrics such as clicks and conversions (purchases on the website following a click). To assess the effectiveness of displayed advertisements without breaching individual user privacy, the W3C organization, in collaboration with various browser manufacturers, is developing a new Ad Attribution API that ensures the accumulation of aggregated statistical data about the conversion of shown advertisements. Google plans to use this API instead of its own version.
- Private Aggregation is used for aggregating and obtaining information about data utilized across different websites (cross-site). For instance, the API enables the generation of summary reports on visitor uniqueness (first and repeat site visits) and user demographics.
- API Shared Storage is for storing data in key-value format, unbound to domain and with the ability to access the storage from different websites.
- API Protected Audience addresses retargeting and assessing one's own audience (working with users who have previously visited the site).
- API Related Website Sets determines the interrelation between websites, based on which browsers can allow limited cross-site access to data.
- requestStorageAccessFor is an extension to the Storage Access API that requests permissions for cross-site access to stored data.
- API Related Website Partition allows external scripts to work with a group of related websites.
- API Select URL enables the selection of the displayed URL based on cross-site data in the Shared Storage, without revealing this data.
- API Protected App Signals retains information about user activity while interacting with applications, which can be useful for displaying advertisements tailored to user interests. For example, the API allows accumulating data on the number of installations, first launches, time spent in the app, purchases made, and actions performed.
- SDK Runtime enables the execution of third-party libraries in an isolated process separate from the Android application process, preventing library functions from accessing resources and memory of the process.
- On-Device Personalization is a technology that personalizes user experience on Android devices using locally stored data that is not sent to external servers.
APIs that have been decided to be preserved, as they are already established and implemented in other browsers:
- FedCM (Federated Credential Management) allows the creation of unified identification services that ensure privacy and operate without third-party cookies.
- CHIPS (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State) allows cookies to be isolated in relation to the top-level domain using the ‘Partitioned’ attribute. In normal circumstances, third-party code from site ‘C’, embedded on sites ‘A’ and ‘B’, can access shared cookies for both sites. However, when the ‘Partitioned’ attribute is specified, cookies set by site ‘C’ will be completely separated when loading code from sites ‘A’ and ‘B’.
- Private State Token allows different users to be separated without using cross-site identifiers and transmits user authentication information across different contexts. This API is useful for distinguishing bots from real visitors without explicitly transferring identifying data. The essence of working with the API is that a specific site where a user has authenticated or verified through CAPTCHAs can generate a token stored on the browser side. This token can be used by other sites to verify that the user is a human and not a bot.
Source: opennet.ru
