Privacy and security – integral to human rights and civil liberties – have long been important in the Web Consortium's agenda. For example, our work has been instrumental in improving Web security through the development of authentication technologies that can replace weak passwords and reduce the threats of phishing and other attacks.
However, users rightly fear the misuse of their personal data and being tracked online, including browser fingerprinting, the spread of disinformation, and other online harms. These are difficult and urgent challenges. We have begun discussions about how to help users find trustworthy content on the Web without increasing censorship.
Privacy incubation
Two W3C Community Groups formed following TPAC 2021, hoping to address tasks that might be complicated by the ongoing deprecation of third party cookies: Federated Identity CG and Anti Fraud CG.
There's a new Private Advertising Technology CG to incubate proposals previously discussed (primarily) in the Web Advertising Business Group.
The Privacy Community Group hosts incubation of new specifications. The group is seeing vibrant participation; its calls routinely draw over 50 participants. Work items include:
- NEW: Ways to mitigation "navigation tracking."
- A mechanism for private click measurement that may be useful to measure advertising success while also preserving user privacy.
- A proposal for isolating sites' data from each other and an API for requesting access to blocked storage.
- Two proposals that may help facilitate login state management in a world where third-party cookies and other tracking mechanisms are being rapidly deprecated: a proposal to declare what domain names are connected to each other and an API to tell a browser if a user is logged into a site.
Unlinkable and unphishable authentication
The Web Authentication Working Group published WebAuthn Level 2 as a Recommendation, and published a First Public Working Draft of Web Authentication Level 3 in April 2021.
The group is adding new features including device-loss recovery and other API enhancements to the group's scope.
The group focuses on related work in adoption with the WebAuthn Adoption Community Group.
?? Watch a short Web Authentication Adoption Community Group video update (October 2021, 5 minutes) by Nick Steele.
Reviewing the privacy of web standards
The Privacy Interest Group (PING) does privacy reviews of other groups' specifications. It has been using new tooling to track issues, and it has had renewed success making working groups aware of privacy and fingerprinting issues in their specifications.
PING is also writing a Target Privacy Threat Model document.
Sponsoring
Organizations can become a Web for All Champion; an option that is open to W3C Members as well as non-members.
Shape the privacy-preserving Web as a W3C Member
W3C Members play a significant role in shaping the Web.
Contact W3C to learn more about the benefits of W3C Membership to play a significant role yourself!