I dug deeper in another direction

Posted Jul 22, 2024 11:35 UTC (Mon) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775)
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

I too dug into this topic. I did not find the connection to Meta, but I did find some major Web players that I do not regard as evil working on the underlying technologies: the Internet Security Research Group (see DivviUp.org) and Cloudflare.

People are actively writing standards (and lots of Rust code!) for a large-scale Differential Privacy facility. There are two IETF Drafts in progress, both quite complicated:

Verifiable Distributed Aggregation Functions (VDAF) (IETF page; from the Crypto Forum Research Group)
Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) (IETF page]; built on VDAF; proposed standard; first product of the IETF Privacy Preserving Measurement Working Group)

For whatever it's worth, 4 authors of the VDAF spec are from Google and Cisco as well as ISRG and Cloudflare.

So this is not just Mozilla and Meta: a bunch of smart people are putting a big effort into supporting user privacy, including partial randomization of the data that advertisers would get.

My conclusions

(1) Some heavyweight players in Web technologies are investing significant resources in a new approach to web advertising.

(2) This approach is intended to compete with Google's "Privacy Sandbox" efforts.

(3) Glibly dismissing this effort does nobody any good.

(4) This is, as a famous guy once said, a Big Fucking Deal.