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…
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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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IPv6 is a big enough topic that any short writing obviously cannot account for all the issues. But it’s important to realize that at its core, the IP version 6 (which was/is supposed to replace IPv4 at some point) is modern technology at its core from the ‘90s…
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When big chunks of user data collected on an industrial scale continue to induce constant privacy concerns, the need to seriously address problems of privacy and data protection with respect to data processing is important as never before. Data is increasingly fed into machine learning models (i.e. “artificial intelligence”…
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