The big day arrived. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) finally agreed for Google to phase out third-party cookies. That's terrific because it improves user welfare. Furthermore, no grace period was requested. Google could do it even today. The catch? Only on iOS, Apple's operating system.
How come that…
Read more
Google announced that they are... Not phasing out third-party cookies? And after 4+ years of development, this is a striking change. I explain what to make out of it. Fast-forward: unclear for at least 1-2 months.
It is a response to part of industry criticism, but also regulatory oversight. At…
Read more
The Digital Markets Act is one of the least understood EU technology laws, yet it has tangible impacts—both positive and negative—on the technology landscape. We’ll use the opportunity to study an interesting and real-world case. It concerns the practice of Chrome preloading its web browser extension so…
Read more
I track the Privacy Sandbox migration process since it's day 1 announcement. Having written some notes about architectural aspects, initial assessments, including identification of data leaks,
When analysing the proposals and imagining the future system, I realised that there's a need to somehow guide the future maintanance or development. So…
Read more
Is Privacy Sandbox’s Federated Learning of Cohorts leaking information about web browsing history? Let's find out.
Federated Learning of Cohorts is computing a SimHash on a user's web browsing history (the lists of visited websites) to obtain the cohort ID. In principle, it is a lossy computation: when only…
Read more