quickly has come to a agreement with Google to use Oblivious Relay HTTP (OHTTP) in FLEDGEan initiative that is part of the Privacy Sandbox, the company’s privacy enhancement initiative. With it, Google seeks to improve privacy, while supporting personalized advertising. Protecting users’ personally identifiable information (PII) for online services that need or want to offer personalized experiences is a complex but critical requirement.
In this context, the Google Chrome browser will stop accepting third-party cookies in 2024. Privacy Sandbox is a set of proposals to reduce tracking between sites and applications, which also helps to keep content and online web services free. FLEDGE, in particular, is a Privacy Sandbox proposal for remarketing and personalized advertising, designed to select relevant ads, but without allowing cross-site tracking.
Using Fastly’s OHTTP Relay, FLEDGE can privately log anonymous ad groups. This makes both FLEDGE and the infrastructure that supports it more private. OHTTP Relay provides fast and reliable separation and isolation of personal data. It also transmits requests that do not identify users to the company’s server. Using purpose-built HTTP requests in a multi-tier architecture, OHTTP Relay strips out all client request headers that are not identified as required by the specification.
In this way it is guaranteed that all the required headers are present before forwarding the request to the configured origin of the company, the OHTTP gateway. In addition, it hides the users’ IP address from Google. For the response from the gateway it also performs the same function.
OHTTP Relay is part of Fastly’s services that are intended to improve privacy. These are available to any online service that wants to offer high levels of privacy to its users.
According to Victor Wong, Director of Product Management at Google«Keeping user data private and secure is critical to the future of online business. And with Fastly, we’ve achieved the best of both worlds, giving users strong privacy protection, while still delivering high-quality, personalized experiences.«.
For his part, Jana Invengar, Vice President of Product, Infrastructure and Network Services at Fastlyhas recalled that «Fastly strives to make the Internet a better and safer place for all users, and the selection of our OHTTP Relay for FLEDGE exemplifies the power and flexibility of our platform to achieve this. We’re excited to play an important role in preserving privacy in the Google ecosystem and improving performance across the web.«.
