Google provides Privacy Sandbox update, plans Chrome updates to protect credentials & prevent tracking

Privacy Sandbox is Google’s initiative to build a more private web through open standards. Announced last year, Chrome in January announced that it plans to “phase out support” for third-party cookies. Google today provided a Privacy Sandbox update and put out a call for “continued help in increasing the privacy of web browsing.”

Building on making third-party cookies obsolete, Google touts Chromium and W3C API proposals to allow for ad selection and other key features “without allowing users’ activity to be tracked across websites.”

For example, fraud protection can be taken care of with Trust Tokens that evaluate a user’s authenticity and makes sure they are not a bot. Testing opened up in July, while last month Click Conversion Measurement API also entered preview 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. 

Meanwhile, Google touts current work on securing and making existing web technologies more private. Besides limiting cross-site tracking, which Google notes is in the process of being adopted by Microsoft Edge and Firefox, Chrome early next year will “strengthen protection against additional types of network attacks that could hijack the users’ privileged credentials to perform malicious actions on their accounts.”

To prevent fingerprint and other tracking techniques, Google last month brought Secure DNS to Chrome for Android after originally debuting on desktops. It also plans to close the “ability for a site to observe other sites that a user might have visited through caching mechanisms.” This change is “coming soon.”

The second part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox update today is to encourage web developers to “give feedback on the web standards community proposals via GitHub and make sure they address your needs.”

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.