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
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We’re excited to announce that registration for the seventh Chrome Dev Summit is now open and you can request your invite here today! During the Summit, we will share our vision for and updates on our work towards moving the web platform forward and of course, have a bit of fun. ‘Cuz what’s Chrome Dev Summit, without some fun? 

Event details:
Date: Nov 11-12, 2019
Venue: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA

What’s happening?

Over the two days, we will focus on the latest best practices, tools and updates coming to the web platform and give developers a chance to hear directly from the Chrome product engineering teams. 
Similar to last year, we’ll have a single track of content in one hall so everyone can enjoy all the sessions and have meaningful discussions. We’re also bringing back the Forum where you’ll be able to enjoy demos of the latest web technologies and developer tools as well as engage with the Chrome team as well as folks from the community.
We’ll be adding more details on the event site, as we move closer to the event, so watch out for more in the coming weeks and months.

Can’t attend in person? 

As always, we want to ensure that Chrome Dev Summit stays inclusive and exciting for everyone, regardless of whether you’re joining us in person or online. We’ll be livestreaming the entire two days of content for our online attendees and will also include some exciting livestream-only content. 
Sign up here so we can send you updates on the livestream and other related info around the event.
The Chrome team is committed to making the Web the best platform to give everyone in the world universal access to content and apps. We want to make it easier for developers to bring best-in-class content and experiences to their users, by making it more powerful and by reducing the cost of development. And we hope to do this as responsible citizens of the community, working with others to uphold our principles of promoting the open web.
We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco for yet another awesome Chrome Dev Summit!

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Content-Herder-and-Speaker-Wrangler-in-Chief
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