Privacy sandbox proposals are moving forward in an organization whose governance is slowly collapsing and whose leadership is disintegrating.
The web technology company W3C has found a new proponent to replace MIT, which will no longer have hosts and administrators in the United States by the end of the year. As our senior editor James Hertcher reports this week, no solution is in sight.
In this week’s episode, we bring you someone familiar with W3C’s internal affairs, Alex Shanku, an advisor to IAB Tech Lab.
Finding your bearings at W3C was a challenge, he recalls when he first joined in 2019: Good sound. Things just died, it took me a while. “
The W3C’s structure requires signing off of every standard stamped by its director, Tim Berners-Lee. But Berners-Lee has been isolated and in some cases does not support the decision made by the crypto or advertising work group.
“I’ve seen people get frustrated with her move,” Shanku said.
In the next episode, we examine FLOC, Google’s cohort-based W3C ad proposal, which came out of the gate before it fell into the privacy challenge.
“It looks like the browser is becoming a data broker.” Cone Dr. “It simply came to our notice then. And that’s how things feel now. “
W3C has a better chance of advancing than ad targeting-centric proposals when it comes to measuring usage.
As ad members jump on the W3C, Cone warns that creating viewers and keeping attributes in the browser doesn’t just change the commercial nature of a browser.
“One of the dangers here is that we put too much in the browser,” Cone said. “We’ve created an ad technology product manager for browser engineers.”