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 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
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 Read More
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 Read More
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 Read More
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 Read More
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” Read More
This post is built around my paper (presented to/at the International Workshop on Privacy Engineering) devoted to privacy assessment in web standards. After the previous one (Battery Status Not Included: Assessing Privacy in W3C Web Standards) this is the next insight in this domain. While I point out the Read More