Automated traffic is increasing across the web, and many websites have responded with more user friction in the form of CAPTCHAs and other challenges to combat unwanted traffic. This degrades the web user experience for all users, with a particularly outsized impact to users in private browsing modes. Private Verification Tokens (PVT) is a low entropy mechanism that allows websites to transfer the trust that their users have established in regular browsing into private browsing mode to reduce their experienced user friction. PVTs are issued during a regular browsing session and redeemed in private browsing mode.
Due to the significant increase in automation over the past 1-2 years, driven largely by AI, websites have responded by adding more challenges to determine if clients are likely to be human. In particular, this has had an outsized impact on users in private browsing mode, who tend to have similar client characteristics as automated clients, such as a cleared local state. We propose providing a very limited signal of user trust transferred from regular browsing into private browsing (one-way only), on a single top level site, with strict privacy properties, a publicly viewable list of registered sites who can use the mechanism, and full user control to disable the feature, to help users in Incognito mode have a more frictionless browsing experience.
Docs: https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/private-verification-tokens
Explainers: https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/private-verification-tokens