Our data has increasing value for companies. For this reason, it is increasingly difficult to preserve our security when we surf the net. When we visit a website, we are not only providing information to said website, but also to all its advertisers and to all the services associated with said page. This information is used for commercial purposes, for example, to measure audiences or to display personalized ads that the user himself is more likely to click on. However, this may end soon thanks to this new feature that is coming to Google Chrome .
Google and privacy the truth is that they are two terms that have rarely gone hand in hand. And much less after the announcement of FLOC, the successor system of cookies that will give the company much greater control over our tastes and interests. However, this time it seems that it has been concerned about the privacy of users, or at least about how different websites share their data. And to avoid this, Google is working on a new security measure known as ” Fenced Frames .”
What are Fenced Frames and how will they improve privacy?
Fenced Frames, or ” closed / delimited frames “, are a new technology by which we make sure that two or more sites cannot share user data through iframes and embedded content. This will prevent tracking and improve the general privacy of users when browsing the Internet.
This new technology forces a boundary between pages and embedded content, delimiting what websites have access to. This reduces tracking and blocks other privacy-related threats.
The main strengths of Fenced Frames are:
- They only allow access to very limited information necessary for the proper functioning of iframes.
- It does not provide access to local storage, so cookies cannot be accessed, under any circumstances.
- It allows access to unsponsored user data information, such as interest groups.
Some websites, such as Facebook , have already positioned themselves against this new privacy measure, as it will greatly limit the information they can collect from users. In any case, there is still a long time to go before seeing it in operation.
A feature in development, will we get to see it?
At the moment, this function is just a prototype . Google engineers are still working on the first sketches of how this feature will work and how to implement it in the browser to protect the privacy of users without breaking the operation of web pages.
If all goes well, in a few months we should have the first experimental version of Fenced Frames ready for testing. It will first reach the Canary version of the browser, and from there it will be debugged until, finally, it is available to all users.
In any case, it may not be more than a prototype in the end. That time will tell us.