SeamlessAccess with Storage Access API
Of Interest to the Information Community
Migration to Storage Access API
As discussed in a string of blog posts last year, SeamlessAccess will be migrating to a new technology. This migration is needed in order to adapt to changes in how browser engines operate, in particular the deprecation of third-party cookies. If you are not familiar with this topic, we encourage you to read through the posts linked just above.
The new implementation makes use of a technology called Storage Access API that has been developed under the Privacy Sandbox initiative spearheaded by Google. Importantly, the Storage Access API is supported across browsers and will enable SeamlessAccess to continue to remember the user’s choice of institute across participating websites in a privacy-preserving manner - though the user experience will be somewhat different compared to the current implementation (which relies on third-party access to local browser storage). We will be following up with a separate post to talk more about the expected changes in user experience.
With this post, we are announcing that a (test) version of the SeamlessAccess service using the Storage Access API is now available for testing. We strongly recommend service providers that are currently integrating with SeamlessAccess to test and share feedback with us. We specifically urge those using the Advanced Mode integration pattern to test because the changes are expected to be the greatest for that pattern and development effort will be required to migrate to the new implementation. As a reminder, we strongly advise integrators to plan to migrate before the end of Q1.
How to test?
A test version of SeamlessAccess that uses the Storage Access API can be found here (see also this blog post for more detail about the various environments available for testing and integrations):
- Discovery service: https://use.thiss.io/ds/
- Persistence service: https://use.thiss.io/ps/
- Front-end code: https://use.thiss.io/thiss.js
Using SeamlessAccess with the Storage Access API feature will require some configuration. To accommodate the different integration patterns that service providers use, we have created a migration guideline which outlines how the new integration is done.
The guideline can be found under our documentation here: https://thiss-ds-js.readthedocs.io/en/stable/using-saa.html.
We welcome any feedback and questions that you may have, preferably over Slack. If you don’t have access to this channel, or would rather contact us over email, feel free to reach out to Hylke Koers (SeamlessAccess Program Director) at hylke@stm-solutions.org.