Google trying to implement a trust token as an alternative to cookies for Ads using API and crypto tokens.
Basics
Currently, the complete web environment heavily relies on cookies to in a way identify users. It tries its best to building trust signals to detect fraudulent or spammy actors. One common way this is done is via tracking an individual browser’s activity across the web, usually via associating stable identifiers across sites that are trustworthy.
As global digital frauds increase and preventing fraud is a legitimate use case that the web should support, but it shouldn’t require an API as powerful as a stable, global, per-user identifier. In third party contexts, merely segmenting users into trusted and untrusted sets seems like a useful primitive that also preserves privacy. This kind of fraud protection is important both for CDNs, as well as for the ad industry which receives a large amount of invalid, fraudulent traffic which may affect the genuine one.
Mechanism
As per the Google GitHub blog, this API proposes a new per-origin storage area for “Privacy Pass” style cryptographic tokens, which are accessible in third-party contexts. These tokens are non-personalized and cannot be used to track users, but are cryptographically signed so they cannot tamper at any level.
Now, When an origin is in a context where they trust the user, they can issue the browser a batch of tokens, which can be “spent” at a later time in a context where the user would otherwise be unknown or less trusted. Crucially, the tokens are indistinguishable from one another, preventing websites from tracking users through them with some kind of permanent identifiers.
This could lead to a be good alternative not only for the advertiser but also for the other web solutions which rely on cookies and should be a best-case for Google Trust token.
Facebook is officially rolling out the Messenger Rooms on WhatsApp. It is however only available to Whatsapp on Web and will come to mobile platforms in the near future. The Messenger Rooms integration on WhatsApp has been long-speculated and now Facebook has finally decided to roll it out for the WhatsApp web users.
