Upcoming privacy changes in the browser, and the impact on payments experiences

Happy New Year, everyone!

At our last meeting before Christmas [1], we talked a little about some
changes that are happening in Chrome, concerning third party (3P) cookies.
It's my understanding that these changes have already been made in Safari
and Firefox (am always happy to be corrected).

Given the impact that the web advertising industry continues to see to many
use cases with changes to 3P cookies, it seems likely that there will be
payments use cases that are adversely affected - it seems likely to me
that, for example, some authentication experiences may increase in
friction, or that "open banking" style payments may gain an additional
"which provider to use" step.

There is some introductory material [2] that we could collectively add to
on our github repo - in particular, analysis of use cases that might
break.

I think it would be worth everyone in the group having a quick look and
review of the issues in question - particularly for PSPs, acquirers,
gateway providers and merchants. I think there is value in being able to
consider the implications as a working group as it might make orchestrating
any mediations or alerting the industry to impacts a little easier.

We will be talking about this topic at our Thursday 20th January 2022
meeting [3].

Thanks
Nick (on behalf of the chairs)


[1] https://www.w3.org/2021/12/09-wpwg-minutes
[2] https://github.com/w3c/webpayments/tree/gh-pages/privacy
[3] https://github.com/w3c/webpayments/wiki/Agenda-20220120