Google Selects Fastly Oblivious HTTP Relay for Privacy Sandbox Initiative to Enhance Online Privacy for Billions of Chrome Users

Fastly, Inc., the world’s fastest global edge cloud platform, announced it has entered into an agreement with Google LLC to operate an Oblivious HTTP Relay (OHTTP Relay) as part of FLEDGE, the Privacy Sandbox initiative to improve privacy while continuing to support tailored advertising.

For online services that need or desire to serve customized experiences, protecting users’ personally identifiable information (PII) has proven to be a complex yet critical requirement. Against this backdrop, Google Chrome is phasing out support for third party cookies in 2024, which are often used for tracking users across websites. The Privacy Sandbox is a set of proposals to reduce cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all across the web.

“We are thrilled to play an important role in Google’s ecosystem-driven approach to preserving privacy and improving performance across the web.”

FLEDGE is a Privacy Sandbox proposal for remarketing and custom audience advertising use cases that is designed to choose relevant ads without allowing cross-site tracking. Using Fastly’s OHTTP Relay, FLEDGE can privately count k-anonymous ads cohorts, making FLEDGE, and the infrastructure that supports it, more private.

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“Keeping users’ data private and safe is critical to the future of online business. And with Fastly, we’ve achieved the best of both worlds, giving users robust privacy protections, while continuing to deliver high quality and personalized experiences” said Victor Wong, Senior Director of Product Management at Google.

OHTTP Relay provides fast, reliable separation and isolation of data about who a person is while passing along non-identifying requests to the business server. Employing specially crafted HTTP requests and a multi-tier architecture, OHTTP Relay removes all client request headers not identified as required by that specification, ensures that required headers are present before forwarding the request to the business’s configured origin (the OHTTP Gateway), and hides users’ IP addresses from Google. It additionally performs the same function for the Gateway response.

“Fastly strives to make the internet a better, safer place for every user – and the selection of our OHTTP Relay for FLEDGE is a testament to our platform’s power and flexibility to do just that,” said Jana Iyengar, Vice President of Product, Infrastructure, and Network Services at Fastly. “We are thrilled to play an important role in Google’s ecosystem-driven approach to preserving privacy and improving performance across the web.”

Fastly’s OHTTP Relay is part of Fastly’s growing line of privacy enablement services, which are available to any online service looking to offer the highest levels of user privacy.

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