theprivacysandbox.com is your place for a single, holistic view of the technology behind the Privacy Sandbox and the on-going design discussions happening in the key W3C community groups. The site is organized as a sequentially-ordered series of posts. Start your journey with this post, which provides an overview of the site's design. Alternatively, go to the Chapters page to access the table of contents. theprivacysandbox.com is independently published and is not affiliated with Google.
Browser Permissions
This will be the last post (for now) on the browser-side before we move into a discussion of the four specific APIs that make up advertising-focused elements of the Google Privacy Sandbox: Topics, Protected Audiences, Attribution Reporting, and Private Aggregation. The topic is browser permissions. Permissions come in two indirectly-related core specifications: the Permissions API specification and the Permissions Policy specification.
Client Hints Infrastructure
In the last post we introduced the basics of browser and device fingerprinting and noted just how much information is available to any website or third-party tag embedded in a served page. The intention was to allow websites to optimize the user experience for the specific combination of device, operating system, browser, screen size, and more on a given viewer’s device.
Browser Fingerprinting & Client Hints
Fingerprinting is a set of techniques for identifying a user agent from characteristics of the browser or the device on which it runs. Some of these techniques are deterministic - for example by reading the user agent header - but many are derived using statistical learning.