While I once hoped 2017 would be the year of privacy, 2024 closes on a troubling note, a likely decrease in privacy standards across the web. I was surprised by the recent Information Commissioner’s Office post, which criticized Google’s decision to introduce device fingerprinting for advertising purposes from…
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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…
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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…
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Digital web advertising is an ecosystem undergoing strategic changes. Google’s Privacy Sandbox is promising to redesign web advertising technology in ways that will respect user’s privacy, including based on some previous designs. Detailed technically-enabled analysis should wait until more design features are known.
In this post I focus…
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There’s a trend of bringing web apps closer to smartphone native apps. You can see it in the increasingly popular Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), web applications that can be installed locally to a smartphone, to subsequently be available to the user just like any other native apps, for example…
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