Cloudflare Collaborates With Leading Browsers to Develop a Privacy-First Protocol For the Global Internet

Cloudflare, Inc. , the leading connectivity cloud company, announced a new initiative with major Web browsers—Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge—committing to developing and submitting for standardization a privacy-preserving protocol to help humans and bots prove that their traffic is not malicious. As the Internet shifts from human-driven clicks to agent activity, website operators must now figure out how to stop aggressive automated traffic, without resorting to invasive tracking. This initiative will lay the foundation for a more frictionless, secure, and private experience for every Internet user and website owner alike.

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“The way we interact with the Internet is facing a fundamental shift. Normal everyday tasks like ordering food previously required a user to personally navigate menus and payment gateways. Now, autonomous agents are starting to orchestrate these workflows on behalf of people,” said Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare. “As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse. Now this collaboration lets us eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor—whether they are human or agent—without sacrificing privacy.”

For decades, website operators have relied on a patchwork of imperfect defense mechanisms to manage automated abuse, but these imperfect techniques are increasingly failing to keep pace with modern threats. Now, with the explosion of Generative AI, the battlefield has shifted yet again. Malicious automation is more widespread, sophisticated, and economically damaging to site owners. As we move toward an era of agentic AI, the line between human behavior and bot activity is blurring, leaving the digital world with an unprecedented privacy problem. When websites attempt to verify that a request originates from a legitimate human or authorized bot, the traditional solutions—forced logins and invasive tracking—compromise user trust.

“In commerce, every extra challenge, delay, or false positive can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart. Merchants need effective protections against automated abuse, but buyers shouldn’t have to pay for them with unnecessary friction or invasive tracking. Shopify is proud to help develop PACT as an open, privacy-preserving standard that can help the millions of businesses on our platform distinguish legitimate shoppers and authorized agents from abusive traffic while preserving buyer privacy.” – Ilya Grigorik, Distinguished Engineer at Shopify.

Private Access Control Tokens (PACT) are designed to allow sites with strong knowledge of “personhood” to issue anonymous tokens. A user’s browser can then provide these tokens to other sites to prove that a human is in the loop, reducing the need for annoying and clunky captchas or invasive tracking. PACT is designed so that sites cannot leverage it to track or identify users or their browsing history.

“The health of the web depends on effective, interoperable, privacy-preserving tools that enable sites to combat abuse without unnecessary user friction. Microsoft is excited to collaborate on developing new standards and helping ensure their deployment across the open web.” – Erik Anderson, Director of Engineering, Web Platform at Microsoft Edge.

“Mozilla is committed to defending openness and user privacy on the web. An avalanche of automated traffic is pushing sites to adopt blunt defenses—paywalls, identity checks, CAPTCHAs, and invasive tracking—simply to tell whether a request comes from a human. We can build a better solution that maintains strong privacy and provides a much less annoying experience for real humans using the web. This project requires collaboration across the ecosystem, and we’re thrilled to work with Cloudflare and other like-minded partners to bring it to life.” – Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla.

PACT will further empower businesses to identify genuine visitors, ensuring they can focus their resources on the traffic that matters to them. PACT leverages trusted information from contexts that have authentic relationships with people while keeping that information private. This provides businesses with high-integrity assurances about their audiences with minimal friction. Using PACT on Cloudflare’s network raises the bar for trustworthiness and integrity online without the traditional costs.

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