What about Utiq, the JV between European ISPs to provide a cross-domain consent-aware ID?

[sukria]

Hi,
I'd like to have Chrome's Privacy Sandbox developers feeling/point of view on the Utiq initiative. Hence this issue (which is more a request for comments actually).

Utiq https://utiq.com/ is a joint venture involving major European ISPs (Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica).
They have been developing a cross-domain, consent-aware ID that is constructed upon IP addresses and phone numbers within 3G/4G networks, seemingly as a workaround in response to the deprecation of third-party cookies.
They plan to upgrade their system to make it work over WiFi and later, in the in-app environment (via a SDK).

As you can see, their goal is to offer a robust alternative to Third-Party Cookies by utilizing network contract and technical details to create a pseudonymous, persistent ID.

Given that one of the primary objectives of Privacy Sandbox is to prevent cross-domain tracking, this makes me wonder if the Sandbox will try to block this initiative.

Will the Privacy Sandbox potentially implement a blacklist of domains that facilitate tracking (similarly to ad blockers), and under such circumstances, could a domain like utiq.com be blacklisted considering it provides cross-domain identifiers while using foundational data points like IP addresses and phone numbers?

Thanks a lot for your views on this.
As you know well, the whole adtech/martech industry is looking into clues about what is relevant for sustainable methods once the Sandbox is fully deployed, this actor (Utiq) is more and more mentioned in possible "solutions". I would love to have your point of view on this.

Thank you.

[michaelkleber]

Chrome is not currently blocking any particular domain because of its performing tracking activities. Other browsers certainly have gone down this path, though, and I cannot make any promises about what Chrome will do in the future.

Right now we are focused on working with the ecosystem to develop new privacy enhancing technologies for a wide range of needs, all with the goal of removing support for third party cookies. Companies with an interest in identity solutions are encouraged to engage in the Federated Identity Community Group, which is incubating privacy-enhancing proposals along those lines.

It has become clear that people don't want to be tracked as they browse the web, and regulatory trends are reflecting people's concerns about privacy. With the Privacy Sandbox, we are working to demonstrate that advertisers and publishers don’t need to track users across sites in order to deliver great experiences to their audiences and support their business models. We want to provide durable options that will help websites respect user expectations for privacy; that’s our focus right now.

[sukria]

Thanks for the insight Michael, clear.