Event Date
Abstract
In 2019, Google announced fundamental changes to the web ecosystem by launching the Privacy Sandbox—an initiative to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome and develop privacy alternatives to common use cases such as advertising. Over the following six years, more than 25 new web features were proposed with some even deployed to real Chrome users, despite a lack of true understanding of their privacy, security, usability, and utility guarantees. In this talk, I will discuss evaluating, measuring, and monitoring changes related to these Privacy Sandbox proposals. To start, I will illustrate through my analyses of the underlying assumption of the Topics API’s design—which enables interest-based advertising without cookies—how I uncovered privacy tradeoffs and quantified their practical significance. Then, I will present results, from a longitudinal measurement of the adoption and deprecation of all Privacy Sandbox mechanisms, that showcase the reactions of the ecosystem to the proposed changes across the past seven years. Finally, I will discuss that, despite its end in late 2025, the Privacy Sandbox represents one of the largest experiments on deploying web privacy techniques in recent years, and how analyzing it can yield actionable recommendations for the next generation of web privacy techniques.
Bio
Yohan Beugin is a Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is a member of the Security and Privacy Research Group, advised by Prof. Patrick McDaniel, and was the lead graduate student in the McDaniel research group. Yohan has received an M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University as well as his French Diplôme d’Ingénieur (B.S. and M.S. in Engineering Sciences) from Centrale Lyon. His current research focuses on online advertising, web tracking, and privacy as well as the security of open-source software. He is the maintainer of the Privacy Sandstorm research portal.