Ehsan Toreini
Web Architecture & Governance.
:: 381 Words

This is the part of my career where research, implementation, and standards meet: identifying a technical problem, understanding its implications at Web scale, and helping turn that understanding into a platform-level constraint or capability.

W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

Associate · 2025–Present

The TAG is the W3C body responsible for stewarding the Web architecture. I contribute to horizontal reviews of emerging specifications, examining their implications for privacy, security, and the Web's architectural principles.

Selected Architectural Finding:

  • Agentic Browsing and Web Architecture (draft): security and privacy considerations of Agentic Browsing.
  • Agentic Web (draft): Editor of a TAG finding on the architectural scope of the Agentic Web.
  • Global Components in User Agents (draft): Editor of a TAG finding examining the role of global components in browser architecture and the dependencies they create for Web APIs.
  • Age Assurance has become a concrete example of the architectural challenges that arise when regulatory requirements meet the open Web. My work in this area focuses on the privacy, security, proportionality, interoperability, and user-agency implications of age-related signals and verification mechanisms.

Specification Editing

My standards work sits at the point where architectural constraints become developer-facing capabilities.

  • Translation API: [Editor] Shaping the standard for native, on-device translation capabilities within the browser.
  • Language Detection API: [Editor] Standardising how browsers expose language detection to developers while mitigating fingerprinting vectors.

Standards Impact

  • At Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) 2026 in Geneva, I participated in three breakouts addressing age assurance and digital credentials, presenting the W3C TAG perspective on privacy, harms, proportionality, and architectural requirements.

  • I co-chair the Emerging Trends in Web Advertising workshop at The Web Conference 2026, bringing together research and practice around privacy-preserving advertising, AI, immersive Web experiences, and the future of Web advertising. The report captures findings relevant to future Web standardisation (see report).

Previous Standards Work

W3C Device & Sensors Working Group

Invited Expert · 2018–2025

I spent seven years working on the privacy and security threat models for hardware-level Web APIs. This work connected my academic research on sensor vulnerabilities with platform-level mitigations for fingerprinting and unauthorised sensor access in the Motion/Orientation APIs.