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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As privacy engineering is getting more and more mature as a field in some settings experts are creating a "privacy checklist" of things to have. It's useful in design, development, and deployment, but also audits. Many useful things could be added to such a list.
Of particular recent relevance is…
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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 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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