Google Chrome has shared its progress on Privacy Sandbox, an initiative that aims to enhance online privacy using the set of open standards. Privacy Sandbox is designed to protect online user data and help Google Chrome prevent intrusive cross-site tracking.
Google Chrome becomes more private
Google Chrome has been working to introduce several new APIs that address fraud protection, ad selection, and conversion measurement while blocking sites from tracking users. Some of the proposed solutions are currently under testing via Chrome origin trials:
Click Conversion Measurement API enables marketers to know whether an ad click resulted in a purchase or a sign-up on another site without connecting the identity of the user across both sites. Meanwhile, Trust Tokens prevent online fraud.
Chrome origin trials allow developers to access these privacy features by letting them integrate the APIs into their products and services in the wake of serious competition from Microsoft Edge.
“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,” said Justin Schuh, Director of Chrome Engineering.
What’s more, Google Chrome is also working to make the existing web technologies more private and secure. Google Chrome continues to limit cross-site tracking. Google Chrome treats cookies that don’t include a SameSite label as first-party.
For third-party contexts, it is mandatory that cookies are labeled as SameSite and accessed over HTTPS.
“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,” Schuh added.
Google Chrome has promised to strengthen protection against network attacks that target the users’ privileged credentials sometime next year. Google is also working on certain changes that help Chrome mitigate deceptive and intrusive tracking techniques like fingerprinting.
Last month, Google rolled out an update, preventing inadvertent sharing of information of Chrome users from one site to another during navigation.
Chrome has already extended its Secure DNS support to Android. Google is also working on a new Chrome feature to prevent sites from tracking user behavior across other sites, courtesy of caching mechanisms.
