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Third party cookies, love them or hate them, have been with us for a long time, and simply dropping them would not be viable without the long phase out. And a
by jffry 6y ago
Third party cookies, love them or hate them, have been with us for a long time, and simply dropping them would not be viable without the long phase out. And a long phase out is not something around which you can form a singular rallying cry.
FLoC is a new thing which is just being rolled out, so it's a lot easier for people to resist adding a new thing that makes the internet more crappy and less private.
I think it's unnecessarily fatalist to say that all of this will continue to happen so what's the point of resisting it. Public awareness and negative opinion of the pervasiveness and creepiness of internet tracking continues to grow, and advocacy against tracking mechanisms helps create the type of groundswell which could actually shift public policy to forbid such tracking.
Google specifically is catching some heat for potential antitrust problems, so raising a ruckus about Google abusing its dominant browser position to cram FLoC into the internet is more likely to have positive effect than ever before.
- slver 6y agoIf you have figured out a way to eliminate tracking, be my guest. Mozilla would like to know, Apple would like to know. Until then FLoC attracts attention because it's new, yes, this explains our reaction. It's still an irrational reaction. Also what's this "predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers" about? You don't need targeting for this. Heck you don't need anything for this. The way it's usually carried out is you hack some sites and redirect them to you landing page about "this one magic trick to riches, banks hate her".
- salawat 6y agoSo you're the one who keeps doing that, or is it a group thing? Just curious. It undoubtedly works, but I've always wondered why it's so pervasive.
- slver 6y agoCongratulations, you win a free iPhone.
- jffry 6y agoMozilla at least has done plenty of things to reduce the effectiveness and scope of tracking on the web. Just because we can't create an ironclad solution doesn't mean that there isn't real value in reducing the usable surface area for profiling and tracking users across the web. FLoC is an additional means of tracking users that is presently being pushed by a giant corporation who controls a significant web browser, of course anybody who is pro-user-privacy would rail against its rollout. It's ridiculous to call that an irrational reaction.
- om2 6y agoApple is doing just fine on greatly reducing tracking, and we don’t think FLoC or anything much like it is necessary. Safari already blocks 3P cookies by default and has done so for a year.
- throw4592745 6y agoI have 3rd party cookies off. The only thing I have seen requiring 3rd party cookies in the last year is Microsoft when I had to use teams.
- tomxor 6y ago> Third party cookies, love them or hate them, have been with us for a long time, and simply dropping them would not be viable without the long phase out. Not true, FireFox and Safari have had them off by default for over a year now. Additionally Chrome had planned to turn them off last year but then cried "covid" which for some reason = delay... because... think of the adverts! i mean covid! Anyway, I'm pretty sure any large websites relying on 3rd party cookies for functionality will have already experienced users blocking issues. We have and have already been forced to change, we don't do ads, but our use case is a bit esoteric in that it needed 3rd party cookies for sessions.
- hirsin 6y agoCare to reach out? This username at Microsoft. We're working to understand what legitimate use cases are broken without 3p cookies so we can work with Google to backfill them. FLOC helps ad trackers track but doesn't help with any of the legitimate uses of 3p cookies like auth.
- pabs3 6y agoAuth should be doable with just redirects though right? Isn't that how OAuth and OpenID connect work?
- catlifeonmars 6y agoSame thought. I’m curious to know what other kinds of authentication protocols require third-party cookies to operate. Within OIDC, even more obscure/advanced features such as session management and global logout require only 1st party (the IdPs) cookies in order to function. I guess the tradeoff being made here is just leaning into our reliance on the certificate authority system. Whereas before, with third party cookies, you might have had more flexibility with how you structure your domains.
- hirsin 6y agoThe implicit grant, while deprecated, is still used across the ecosystem. Further, embedded apps (eg you have a portal that iframes Salesforce and Salesforce needs to be authenticated) can't redirect to the login page or open that iframe for cookies. Front channel logout is also broken, part of the OIDC spec. It opens iframes to sites, but the sites don't get their cookies and can't write them.
- rtpg 6y agoAnother thing is that third-party cookies can actually offer real functionality that has nothing to do with advertising (for example platforms like Salesforce let you integrate your own offering into a Salesforce users' system, and third-party cookies can be a pretty straightforward way of accomplishing that). I don't see really any non-tracking reason for FLoC
- izacus 6y ago> FLoC is a new thing which is just being rolled out, so it's a lot easier for people to resist adding a new thing that makes the internet more crappy and less private. What exactly about FLoC is making the internet less private though? Every time I see the technology it seems that it's deliberately built to keep private data in your Chrome browser and leak significantly less than anything else Ad related right now. Also, why is WordPress allowing so many ad and anlytics tracking plugins and not considering those as security issues?