Focussing on Privacy and Security at Code://Remote - Web Directions

Focussing on Privacy and Security at Code://Remote

John Allsopp 29th June, 2020 @johnallsopp

Concern for users’ privacy and security has been growing for several years and has only been accelerated by recent conversations around the use of mobile devices for contact tracing and the use of facial recognition by police forces.

Two decades on from SUN Microsystems CEO Scot McNealy’s infamous “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it” quip, calling consumer privacy a “red herring”, Apple has made privacy a fundamental proposition of their platforms, while Google CEO Sudar Pichai only recently tweeted “Privacy is at the heart of everything we do” (a statement met with some scepticism in some quarters).

Meanwhile, for several years, privacy and security have been at the heart of new capabilities of the Web platform–from the requirement of sites to use HTTPS if they want to take advantage of new browser APIs, to a rigorous focus on privacy and security implications of new browser APIs during their standardization process (which saw for example the Battery Status API, which had been fully supported in Firefox, deprecated after researchers discovered it could be used to fingerprint and track users even when in anonymous mode.

So, it would make sense that our upcoming Code://Remote we’ll have quite some focus on just these issues.

Marcos Caceres, a standards engineer at Mozilla, former member of the W3C TAG, and chair of several W3C working groups will look at The Web in the age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Although early web standards forewarned of the privacy risk of technologies like cookies, they never envisioned that the Web Platform would be coopted for global-scale mass surveillance. In response, browser vendors have been working together to clamp down on the most egregious privacy abuses. 

In this talk, Marcos will discuss breaking changes and new APIs that will help make the web platform more private and secure, and what these changes will mean for you as a developer and user going forward.

Ben Dechrai will help us Say Goodbye to Passwords and Hello to WebAuthn, a standard adopted by Apple for Touch ID and Face ID logins to Web sites in Safari as just announced at WWDC. WebAuthn

from the W3C and FIDO that “allows servers to register and authenticate users using public key cryptography instead of a password”. WebAuthn is part of a set of standards that enable passwordless authentication between servers, browsers, and authenticators. It’s supported in all modern browsers.

Meanwhile, Co-Char of the W3C Web Performance Working Group Yoav Weiss will consider the trade-off between Security and Privacy,

discussing different examples outlining this tension, digging deeper into them, understanding the underlying principles behind the web’s security model, and hopefully agreeing that we need both a performant and safe web to keep our users happy.

And that’s just a fraction of what’s on offer at Code://Remote.

See two dozen world-leading experts on all things JavaScript and front end development at Code://Remote August 2020

Code://Remote takes place across the month of August, and features two dozen world-leading experts on all things JavaScript and front end development at an amazing price, just $195 before June 30th.

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Conveniently timed for attendees from the North American West Coast, right across the pacific to Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan and beyond connect–with your peers at Code.

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