Cloudflare has brought Mozilla, Google and Microsoft on board for a new protocol that must demonstrate that web traffic can be trusted, without identifying or tracking the user.
The tech companies are jointly going to develop the so‑called Private Access Control Tokens system (PACT). Its purpose is twofold: to remove the irritating clicking work of captchas from the world of the internet user, and make the hidden practice of fingerprinting redundant.
The underlying idea is simple. A site that knows a user well can issue an anonymous token. A kind of coin that confirms you are a sort of friend of a friend. The Web browser presents that token to other sites to prove that there is a human at the controls. Those sites cannot use it to track anyone or trace it back to browsing behaviour. But the knowledge that it is not a script or bot is enough not to put up technical barriers.
The fact that, in addition to Google Chrome, Shopify is also taking part greatly enlarges the pool of ‘known users’.
The technology builds on Privacy Pass, which Cloudflare has been using since 2017 and which has been laid down as an RFC. Apple has been running on it for years with its Private Access Tokens, but the browsers lagged behind.
Recent figures from Cloudflare show that websites nowadays receive more visitor traffic from AI bots than from people.
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