Chromium Blog: chrome privacy

Progress on Privacy Sandbox and building a more private web

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Last year we announced a new initiative (known as Privacy Sandbox) to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. With Privacy Sandbox we’ve been exploring privacy-preserving mechanisms with the web community that protect user data and prevent intrusive cross-site tracking. Our aim is to preserve the vitality of the open web by continuing to enable the rich, quality content and services that people expect, but with even stronger guarantees of privacy and safety. Today we’re sharing progress on this long-term initiative and asking for your continued help in increasing the privacy of web browsing.

In January we shared our intent to develop privacy-preserving open-standards that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Since then, Google and others have proposed several new APIs to address use cases like fraud protection, ad selection, and conversion measurement without allowing users’ activity to be tracked across websites. Following web community input, some of these solutions are now available for experimental testing via Chrome origin trials:

Click Conversion Measurement API opened up for testing in September and aims to enable marketers to know whether an ad click resulted in a conversion (for example, a purchase or a sign-up) on another site, without connecting the identity of the user across both sites.

Trust Tokens opened up for testing in July and is intended to support a number of use cases evaluating a user’s authenticity, including combating fraud.

If you integrate APIs into your products and services, you can register for access to these and other APIs through Chrome origin trials. We encourage ecosystem stakeholders to participate and share their feedback and results. Developing and implementing web standards which change the core architecture of the web is a complex process, so we are taking a long-term, collaborative approach.

We’re also continuing our work to make current web technologies more secure and private.

Earlier this year Chrome started limiting cross-site tracking by treating cookies that don’t include a SameSite label as first-party only, and requiring cookies to be labeled and accessed over HTTPS in order to be available in third-party contexts. With this update — which Edge and Firefox are in the process of adopting — third-party cookies are no longer sent for the 99.9% of registered domains that do not require them, improving privacy and security for the vast majority of sites on the web.

In a release early next year, Chrome will also strengthen protection against additional types of network attacks that could hijack the users’ privileged credentials to perform malicious actions on their accounts.

We’re also rolling out changes in Chrome to mitigate deceptive and intrusive tracking techniques, such as fingerprinting.

In September we rolled out an update to prevent inadvertent sharing of information such as users' names and access tokens. When users navigate from one site to another we are reducing the information from the originating page’s URL that is sent to the destination site by default.

Also in September, we extended support of Secure DNS in Chrome beyond desktop to Android. Secure DNS is designed to improve user safety and privacy while browsing the web by automatically switching to DNS-over-HTTPS if the user's current provider supports it.

Coming soon, we’re also closing the ability for a site to observe other sites that a user might have visited through caching mechanisms.

As always, we encourage you to give feedback on the web standards community proposals via GitHub and make sure they address your needs. And if they don’t, file issues through GitHub or email the W3C group. If you rely on the web for your business, please ensure your technology vendors engage in this process and that the trade groups who represent your interests are actively engaged.

We are appreciative of the continued engagement as we build a more trustworthy and sustainable web together. We will continue to keep everyone posted on the progress of efforts to increase the privacy of web browsing.

Posted by Justin Schuh - Director, Chrome Engineering

Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

In August, we announced a new initiative (known as Privacy Sandbox) to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. Our goal for this open source initiative is to make the web more private and secure for users, while also supporting publishers. Today, we’d like to give you an update on our plans and ask for your help in increasing the privacy of web browsing.
After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years. But we cannot get there alone, and that’s why we need the ecosystem to engage on these proposals. We plan to start the first origin trials by the end of this year, starting with conversion measurement and following with personalization.

Users are demanding greater privacy--including transparency, choice and control over how their data is used--and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands. Some browsers have reacted to these concerns by blocking third-party cookies, but we believe this has unintended consequences that can negatively impact both users and the web ecosystem. By undermining the business model of many ad-supported websites, blunt approaches to cookies encourage the use of opaque techniques such as fingerprinting (an invasive workaround to replace cookies), which can actually reduce user privacy and control. We believe that we as a community can, and must, do better.

Fortunately, we have received positive feedback in forums like the W3C that the mechanisms underlying the Privacy Sandbox represent key use-cases and go in the right direction. This feedback, and related proposals from other standards participants, gives us confidence that solutions in this space can work. And our experience working with the standards community to create alternatives and phase out Flash and NPAPI has proven that we can come together to solve complex challenges.

We’ll also continue our work to make current web technologies more secure and private. As we previously announced, Chrome will limit insecure cross-site tracking starting in February, by treating cookies that don’t include a SameSite label as first-party only, and require cookies labeled for third-party use to be accessed over HTTPS. This will make third-party cookies more secure and give users more precise browser cookie controls. At the same time, we’re developing techniques to detect and mitigate covert tracking and workarounds by launching new anti-fingerprinting measures to discourage these kinds of deceptive and intrusive techniques, and we hope to launch these measures later this year.

We are working actively across the ecosystem so that browsers, publishers, developers, and advertisers have the opportunity to experiment with these new mechanisms, test whether they work well in various situations, and develop supporting implementations, including ad selection and measurement, denial of service (DoS) prevention, anti-spam/fraud, and federated authentication.

We are looking to build a more trustworthy and sustainable web together, and to do that we need your continued engagement. We encourage you to give feedback on the web standards community proposals via GitHub and make sure they address your needs. And if they don’t, file issues through GitHub or email the W3C group. If you rely on the web for your business, please ensure your technology vendors engage in this process and share your feedback with the trade groups that represent your interests.

We will continue to keep everyone posted on the progress of efforts to increase the privacy of web browsing.

Posted by Justin Schuh - Director, Chrome Engineering

Potential uses for the Privacy Sandbox

Thursday, August 22, 2019

outlined our visiona series of explainers User information

Ad Selection

One of the most challenging questions is what your browser could do to allow a publisher to pick relevant content or show a relevant ad to you, while sharing as little information about your browsing history as possible.

We're exploring how to deliver ads to large groups of similar people without letting individually identifying data ever leave your browser — building on the Differential Privacy techniques we've been using in Chrome for nearly 5 years to collect anonymous telemetry information. New technologies like Federated Learning show that it's possible for your browser to avoid revealing that you are a member of a group that likes Beyoncé and sweater vests until it can be sure that group contains thousands of other people.

Conversion Measurement

Publishers and advertisers need to know if advertising actually leads to more business. If it’s driving sales, it’s clearly relevant to users, and if it’s not, they need to improve the content and personalization to make it more relevant. Users then benefit from ads centered around their interests, and advertisers benefit from more effective advertising.

Both Google and Apple have already published early stage thinking to evaluate how one might address some of these use cases. These proposals are a first step in exploring how to address the measurement needs of the advertiser without letting the advertiser track a specific user across sites.

Fraud Prevention

Publishers today often need to detect and prevent fraudulent behavior, for instance false transactions or attempts to fake ad activity to steal money from advertisers and publishers. Many companies, including Google, work to detect and prevent fraud, and that’s especially true of ad companies and ad fraud.

Some of the tools used to legitimately fight fraud today use techniques that can benefit from using more privacy safe mechanisms. One example is the PrivacyPass token, introduced by CloudFlare for Tor users, which is now moving through the standards process.

Protecting the Sandbox Boundary

Our experience has shown us that removing certain capabilities from the web causes developers to find workarounds to keep their current systems working rather than going down the well-lit path. We’ve seen this recently in response to the actions that other browsers have taken to block cookies - new techniques are emerging that are not transparent to the user, such as fingerprinting.

With fingerprinting, developers have found ways to learn tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed. By combining several of these small data points together they can generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and this means that even if a user wishes not to be identified, they cannot stop the developer from doing so. We think this subversion of user choice is wrong.

As referenced in May at I/O, we are actively taking steps to prevent fingerprinting. We are proposing the implementation of what we call a privacy budget. With a privacy budget, websites can call APIs until those calls have revealed enough information to narrow a user down to a group sufficiently large enough to maintain anonymity. After that, any further attempts to call APIs that would reveal information will cause the browser to intervene and block further calls.

We appreciate you taking the time to read through our early proposals for building the Privacy Sandbox. We understand it is ambitious and can’t overstate how important it is that this be refined and improved as a result of collaboration across the industry, including other browsers and publishers. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Posted by Justin Schuh - Director, Chrome Engineering

Project Strobe: Updates to Our User Data Policy

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

We’re requiring extensions to only request access to the least amount of data. While this has previously been encouraged of developers, now we’re making this a requirement for all extensions.

We’re requiring more extensions to post privacy policies, including extensions that handle personal communications and user-provided content. Our policies have previously required any extension that handles personal and sensitive user data to post a privacy policy and handle that data securely. Now, we’re expanding this category to include extensions that handle user-provided content and personal communications. Of course, extensions must continue to be transparent in how they handle user data, disclosing the collection, use and sharing of that data.

Inventory your extensions' current permissions and, where possible, switch to alternatives that are more narrowly scoped. Additionally, include a list of permissions used and the reasons you require them in your Chrome Web Store listing or in an "about page" in your extension. If you expand the features of your extension and require a new permission, you may only request the new permission in the updated version of the extension.

If your extension handles Personal or Sensitive User Data, which now also includes, user-provided content and personal communications, your Product must both post a privacy policy and handle the user data securely, including transmitting it via modern cryptography. To add a privacy policy, use the developer dashboard to link to your privacy policy with your developer account. All your published extensions share the same privacy policy.

User Data FAQ.
Posted by Alexandre Blondin and Swagateeka Panigrahy, Chrome Product & Policy

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Chromium Blog

Progress on Privacy Sandbox and building a more private web

Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete

Potential uses for the Privacy Sandbox

Project Strobe: Updates to Our User Data Policy

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