Differential privacy code removed from Chromium

skybrian
2021-06-25T21:41:07Z

In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February.

I haven't seen any announcement, discussion, or explanation of this based on a brief web search, so I figured I'd note it here.

At about the time this process finished, there was a Google blog post about how they're still using it in other products.

We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant.

(If you read this quickly, you might think it's still used in Chrome.)

Reading between the lines, I suspect that some folks at Google are still advocating for more usage of differential privacy, but they lost an important customer. Why that happened is a mystery.

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