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Web Directions Safe ’21 session spotlight–Set safer site defaults for today and tomorrow

Set safer site defaults for today and tomorrow

The web has a history of being an over-sharer. Original defaults tended to allowing everything—with restrictions needing to be explicitly added by the site. Newer APIs follow the principle of least privilege, so that’s better, but still have the challenge of maintaining backwards-compatibility leaves sites with a lot of responsibility to create a safe experience for visitors.

We’ll explore how the platform is moving to safer defaults—from phasing out third-party cookies, removing passive fingerprinting surfaces, and enforcing cross-origin isolation.

Alongside these ongoing efforts, we’ll also go through the changes you can make today to protect your site—from improving cookie usage to locking down your third-party interactions. We will also explore some patterns for balancing appropriate collection of user information with protecting those same users from phishing or other forms of fraud.

Rowan Merewood

Banner for a presentation at our Safe conference. Features animate of the speaker Rowan Merewood, and beneath that the text "Rowan Merewood Developer Relations Engineer Chrome Set safer site defaults for today and tomorrow". To the right details about the conference "Web Directions safe 2021 Global, Online Dec. 3 & 10 2021 security, privacy, identity for front end developers"

Rowan leads the Developer Relations team for security, privacy, payments, and identity for Chrome. Essentially anywhere people are creating—or specifically not creating—relationships on the web. Recently that’s meant a lot of focus on cookies and the long road to getting us all to consume fewer of them.

In his seven years at Google he’s worked across a variety of areas from Android, Firebase, and all the way back to Google+. In the end though, the web has always been his natural home.

In 2022 we have a whole series of events for Front End Developers

Across 2022 Web Directions is presenting our series of online conferences for front end designers and developers. Focussed deep dives, they go far beyond what you might expect from conference programs.

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Priced individually from $195, or attend all 6, plus get access to our conference presentation platform Conffab for just $595, or $59 a month.

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I had an absolute blast, learnt so much, and met so many great people

Carmen Chung Software engineer, Valiant Finance