9 ms·

Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

124 points by PhearTheCeal 14y ago

dangrossman 14y ago
"Firefox Abandons Standards, Will Soon Stop Honoring HTTP Specification, Throwing Away Valid Headers It Doesn't Like". Admittedly, I'm biased.
- mdavidn 14y ago
  Cookies aren't in the HTTP specification. RFC 2109, published a year after Netscape and then IE began accepting cookies, recommended that browsers block all third-party cookies.
jacquesm 14y ago
Excellent. Now we need to block third party javascript and then we have a chance at a more secure web. After all, any third party javascript could be done by an underwater call between the server and the provider of the service.
- patrickaljord 14y ago
  Not sure blocking all ads will help the web. All those free sites you visit need to get their money from somewhere.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    You could easily get the ad underwater and embed it properly.
  - ihsw 14y ago
    It would establish the web as a safe and secure platform, and I think that's in the best interest of the web. To hell with your personal ambition to underhandedly monetize other people's users. EDIT: I changed my statement from 'monetize your users' to specify 'other users' as that more accurately reflects the impact of Mozilla's change. Third-party cookies are used for tracking users that aren't yours.
    - melvinram 14y ago
      With that statement, you're also saying "To hell with YouTube, Facebook, WordPress.com and every other site that wouldn't survive without money."
      - ryanhuff 14y ago
        How does blocking third party Javascript prevent the sites that you mention from monetizing?
        amastilovic 14y ago
        It lowers their income by forcing them to succumb to non-targeted advertising which is less effective and brings less money. I'd love to see your ideas of a free and secure web without marketing money flowing into content provider websites.
        ihsw 14y ago
        They have enough varied content to effectively provide re-targeted ads.
        ryanhuff 14y ago
        Striving to maximize revenue is great. However, I don't see this particular issue as black and white as you present it. This will certainly make some websites less profitable, but I doubt that it would bring an end to the free web. In fact, aren't there are other ways to do retargeting? Given Google's relationship with Mozilla, if this move would negatively impact Google, i would be very surprised to see it happen.
        amastilovic 14y ago
        You are correct, it won't affect the omnipresent Google because virtually everyone has visited their domain at some point. This will target alternatives to Google, leaving us with one company to do effective advertising. How is this in the interests of the end user is beyond me, really.
- DanielN 14y ago
  There is plenty of third party javascript that is not at all predatory. Pretty much all analytics services, Olark and other similar customer outreach services, A/B testing suites. There is far more of a push to create new more secure avenues for third party js (namely cors and websockets) to exist than there are efforts to eliminate it. I'm curious how this change will effect services like optimizely that rely on third party cookies to prevent tests being run on the same users multiple times.
  - muyuu 14y ago
    We would go back to hosting our own stuff. Big deal.
robmil 14y ago
For those about to bemoan the breaking of things like Google Analytics: this patch only blocks third party cookies from domains that the user has never visited before. Since 99% of your visitors will have visited google.com, your Analytics should continue to function even after this update.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  The GA script loads from google-analytics.com, not google.com. ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
  - jsomethings 14y ago
    Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/ http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
    - magicalist 14y ago
      that looks like they're talking about doubleclick, not google analytics. GA works by setting a first party cookie, so there's no need to work around anything. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/cookie-usage https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... edit: oh, jonknee already mentioned that below.
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    Google can just change their analytics domain to google.com. Safari already uses this cookie policy.
- burke 14y ago
  That's still a piss-poor heuristic to rely on -- especially because it biases your analytics data toward google-users.
JoshTriplett 14y ago
I don't actually think this policy will have the desired effect of improving privacy and similar. While I do think advertisers and analytics abuse third-party cookies, they also have a dozen other things they can switch to that the browser provides fewer facilities to control: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ http://samy.pl/evercookie/ Meanwhile, any legitimate services that rely on third-party cookies would have little choice but to switch to whatever mechanism the advertisers switch to, to remain functional.
- eric-hu 14y ago
  What are legitimate uses of third party cookies? Not trying to be snarky or sarcastic, I'm just unaware.
  - elehack 14y ago
    Logging in to services like Disqus, for one thing.
- Amadou 14y ago
  I agree, I think it is just a small escalation in the arms race. Personally, I'd rather have tools that pollute the data being collected rather than just blocking it. Imagine a firefox add-on that keeps entirely seperate "cookie jars" based on referrer. So if you visited 100 different websites you would have a 100 different cookies for any particular advertising network, each one unique to the specific website you were looking at.
chewxy 14y ago
I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out. Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pixel to actually capture a person's TCP stack). You can use 3rd party cookies for good and evil. For example, for my personal project, Fork the Cookbook (http://forkthecookbook.com http://forkthecookbook.com) I'm working on using pixel drops to track how many people fork recipes from embedded recipes (how else would one measure success of an idea). Most analytics softwares like Google Analytics uses 3rd party cookies. I'm not too sure about evil uses of 3rd party cookies. I do not consider retargeting to be evil. Other stuff like tracking browsing history can be done but it is extremely inefficient, and does not really return much for the amount of time and effort invested into it. What about PII you ask? Start with drop sites, where people willingly submit their personally identifiable information, and then it's up to the DMPs to actually correlate the data, which can then be used as ad targeting information. As far as I can tell, even with the big hoohaa over companies like Rapleaf, the truth of the matter is that it's very very inefficient so far. Privacy is simple IMO. Don't submit your information to websites that ask for anything more than what is needed. Banning third party cookies is like using a cannon to shoot a mosquito.
- _delirium 14y ago
  As an internet user, retargeting is honestly one of my #1 targets. I find it super-creepy that some websites show me things based on other websites I visit, and I want a way to stop it.
  - melvinram 14y ago
    Would you rather see ads for things that are completely irrelevant? Relevance requires data. Edit: I do believe the user should have more control over what companies are allowed to retarget with an easy opt out mechanism implemented by every ad network as well as a way to limit the frequency. I've experience companies going WAY overboard on their retargeting and it feels stalker-ish.
NelsonMinar 14y ago
I blocked third party cookies in Chrome for awhile and finally gave up. It broke a surprising number of things, particularly Disqus embeds. Also the Instapaper bookmarklet although I admit that's a nerdy special case. Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired. That's a hard user interaction to get right. (Disqus apparently now works without third party cookies: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabling-cookies http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabl...)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisblackwell 14y ago
  To get sites like Disqus working while blocking third party cookies, just set an exception. I set exceptions for sites like google.com, disqus.com and evernote.com
  - Encosia 14y ago
    Same here. I've been blocking third-party cookies in Chrome since the option was available, and have built up a list of exceptions that I'm comfortable with. I don't think it's reasonable that your average user would be able to figure that out though. Usually, it's not obvious at all that third-party cookie blocking is even responsible for feature breakage in the first place.
- Flenser 14y ago
  Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired They do. The title of the bug is "Block cookies from sites I haven't visited" and the blog post[1] explains that any site with 1st party cookies can set 3rd party cookies on other sites. Apparently this is how Safari works too. [1]http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-policy/ http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-polic...
  - 14y ago
lubos 14y ago
I don't think third-party cookies are such a big deal. It won't stop retargeting (workarounds are possible) so what is it really solving?
- cremnob 14y ago
  What are some of the workarounds?
  - taf2 14y ago
    etags, png image, something about tcp stack tracking... there are work arounds and there will be more workarounds... blocking cookies is stupid... they are part of the web
    - taf2 14y ago
      here's a new one css ever cookie, shit it out in an hour after reading this post: https://gist.github.com/taf2/5022672 https://gist.github.com/taf2/5022672
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
cft 14y ago
I cannot fully rationalize it, but I intuitively feel that this "holier than thee" Mozialla's approach will ultimately contribute to Firefox's demise.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  Safari already uses this cookie policy.
  - Kylekramer 14y ago
    While I don't agree that this is indictive of Firefox's demise, saying "fourth place browser does it" is hardly a compelling counterpoint.
    - cpeterso 14y ago
      Safari on iOS is an important browser, in terms of market share.
- mehrzad 14y ago
  But better for the web. Maybe some of their ideas aren't feasible but at least they get people to talk/think about this stuff.
sokrates 14y ago
This is awesome. I have had third-party cookies disabled in Chrome for a long time now, and I rarely experienced any issues with embeds (Disqus being the noteworthy exception). While Idespise third-party tracking embeds in general, they have gained significant traction on the web (the worst offender is of course Facebook). Since many people think site owners cannot be blamed for that (I think they can), blocking third-party cookies to me is the next best thing for the end user. Also, it's just intuitive to me; when I visit a shop, and I identify myself to the clerk, why should I automatically identify to all bystanders in the shop?
Dylan16807 14y ago
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3488893&cid=42991759 http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3488893&cid=4299... Uh oh. Any site that you visit even once can give you a cookie and suddenly become immune to third-party blocking.
- Encosia 14y ago
  That's actually a pretty elegant solution to the issues that most of Firefox's userbase would encounter if all third-party cookies were blocked (e.g. not being able to log in with or share via their Twitter and Facebooks accounts). How often do real users, particularly the ones who are unaware that cross-site tracking is even going on, visit domains like doubleclick.net or googleads.g.doubleclick.net? For comparison, I block third-party cookies in Chrome and doubt that most users would be able to navigate the process of understanding when that breaks features on sites and then resolving the issue by selectively allowing the impacted domains. So, I think that's a positive feature in Firefox's (soon-to-be) implementation.
taf2 14y ago
this is short cited. we don't even know or can imagine the type of interesting applications we are eliminating by saying no to third party cookies. I remember building a reservation widget that loaded via an iframe on a third party domain. Perhaps we would want to maintain some of the reservation history on the users browser (e.g. third party cookie). I believe this would still work, but as we continue to focus only on the use case of advertising and blocking re-marketing ads... we should remember there are other legit use cases for third party cookies.
dfgonzalez 14y ago
I don't like this, beyond the discussion if 3rd party cookies are good or bad, these measures are always for the worst. Not long ago IE set DoNotTrack by default. What happened? Every single company that respected the user decision for DoNotTrack, stopped doing so since it wasn't the user, but a browser the one who decided that. Long story short: All the effort done with DoNotTrack was wasted. With this story, cookie tracking is far from perfection. It might be great for ad companies, might me useful for retailers and might be creepy for some users, but IMO is the safest way there's to date to keep the equilibrium. There are choices to be protected from cookie tracking and there's plenty of information.
- nwh 14y ago
  There's a critical difference here though. DNT was asking not to be tracked, not allowing the cookies is forcing it.
gtani 14y ago
Per links on Duckduckgo, i installed FF plugins: noScript, privacyFix, doNotTrackMe, HTTPS everywhere, adBlock. Now maybe 5-8% of sites i visit show no content whatsoever, and maybe 1/3 of all sites total are broken. For those, Chrome http://fixtracking.com/#firefox http://fixtracking.com/#firefox
unclebucknasty 14y ago
With so many APIs in use, integrations, etc, there will be the potential for a lot of broken stuff. And many non-tech users won't understand why some sites suddenly stopped working. It will just present more challenges for developers of good apps that users want, in order to stop one set of specific behaviors that they do not want. But advertisers won't just go home. They will find other ways to reach people with possibly more obnoxious and/or invasive tactics. Reminds me of the spam problem. With all of the spam "solutions" and policies in place, it is now much harder than it should be for legit businesses to send emails to customers who've requested them. Yet spammers are still doing their thing with impunity.

124 points by PhearTheCeal 14y ago

"Firefox Abandons Standards, Will Soon Stop Honoring HTTP Specification, Throwing Away Valid Headers It Doesn't Like". Admittedly, I'm biased.

mdavidn 14y ago
Cookies aren't in the HTTP specification. RFC 2109, published a year after Netscape and then IE began accepting cookies, recommended that browsers block all third-party cookies.

jacquesm 14y ago

Excellent. Now we need to block third party javascript and then we have a chance at a more secure web. After all, any third party javascript could be done by an underwater call between the server and the provider of the service.

patrickaljord 14y ago
Not sure blocking all ads will help the web. All those free sites you visit need to get their money from somewhere.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  You could easily get the ad underwater and embed it properly.
- ihsw 14y ago
  It would establish the web as a safe and secure platform, and I think that's in the best interest of the web. To hell with your personal ambition to underhandedly monetize other people's users. EDIT: I changed my statement from 'monetize your users' to specify 'other users' as that more accurately reflects the impact of Mozilla's change. Third-party cookies are used for tracking users that aren't yours.
  - melvinram 14y ago
    With that statement, you're also saying "To hell with YouTube, Facebook, WordPress.com and every other site that wouldn't survive without money."
    - ryanhuff 14y ago
      How does blocking third party Javascript prevent the sites that you mention from monetizing?
      - amastilovic 14y ago
        It lowers their income by forcing them to succumb to non-targeted advertising which is less effective and brings less money. I'd love to see your ideas of a free and secure web without marketing money flowing into content provider websites.
        ihsw 14y ago
        They have enough varied content to effectively provide re-targeted ads.
        ryanhuff 14y ago
        Striving to maximize revenue is great. However, I don't see this particular issue as black and white as you present it. This will certainly make some websites less profitable, but I doubt that it would bring an end to the free web. In fact, aren't there are other ways to do retargeting? Given Google's relationship with Mozilla, if this move would negatively impact Google, i would be very surprised to see it happen.
        amastilovic 14y ago
        You are correct, it won't affect the omnipresent Google because virtually everyone has visited their domain at some point. This will target alternatives to Google, leaving us with one company to do effective advertising. How is this in the interests of the end user is beyond me, really.
DanielN 14y ago
There is plenty of third party javascript that is not at all predatory. Pretty much all analytics services, Olark and other similar customer outreach services, A/B testing suites. There is far more of a push to create new more secure avenues for third party js (namely cors and websockets) to exist than there are efforts to eliminate it. I'm curious how this change will effect services like optimizely that rely on third party cookies to prevent tests being run on the same users multiple times.
- muyuu 14y ago
  We would go back to hosting our own stuff. Big deal.

robmil 14y ago

For those about to bemoan the breaking of things like Google Analytics: this patch only blocks third party cookies from domains that the user has never visited before. Since 99% of your visitors will have visited google.com, your Analytics should continue to function even after this update.

dangrossman 14y ago
The GA script loads from google-analytics.com, not google.com. ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
- jsomethings 14y ago
  Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/ http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
  - magicalist 14y ago
    that looks like they're talking about doubleclick, not google analytics. GA works by setting a first party cookie, so there's no need to work around anything. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/cookie-usage https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... edit: oh, jonknee already mentioned that below.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  Google can just change their analytics domain to google.com. Safari already uses this cookie policy.
burke 14y ago
That's still a piss-poor heuristic to rely on -- especially because it biases your analytics data toward google-users.

JoshTriplett 14y ago

I don't actually think this policy will have the desired effect of improving privacy and similar. While I do think advertisers and analytics abuse third-party cookies, they also have a dozen other things they can switch to that the browser provides fewer facilities to control: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ http://samy.pl/evercookie/ Meanwhile, any legitimate services that rely on third-party cookies would have little choice but to switch to whatever mechanism the advertisers switch to, to remain functional.

eric-hu 14y ago
What are legitimate uses of third party cookies? Not trying to be snarky or sarcastic, I'm just unaware.
- elehack 14y ago
  Logging in to services like Disqus, for one thing.
Amadou 14y ago
I agree, I think it is just a small escalation in the arms race. Personally, I'd rather have tools that pollute the data being collected rather than just blocking it. Imagine a firefox add-on that keeps entirely seperate "cookie jars" based on referrer. So if you visited 100 different websites you would have a 100 different cookies for any particular advertising network, each one unique to the specific website you were looking at.

chewxy 14y ago

I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out. Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pixel to actually capture a person's TCP stack). You can use 3rd party cookies for good and evil. For example, for my personal project, Fork the Cookbook (http://forkthecookbook.com http://forkthecookbook.com) I'm working on using pixel drops to track how many people fork recipes from embedded recipes (how else would one measure success of an idea). Most analytics softwares like Google Analytics uses 3rd party cookies. I'm not too sure about evil uses of 3rd party cookies. I do not consider retargeting to be evil. Other stuff like tracking browsing history can be done but it is extremely inefficient, and does not really return much for the amount of time and effort invested into it. What about PII you ask? Start with drop sites, where people willingly submit their personally identifiable information, and then it's up to the DMPs to actually correlate the data, which can then be used as ad targeting information. As far as I can tell, even with the big hoohaa over companies like Rapleaf, the truth of the matter is that it's very very inefficient so far. Privacy is simple IMO. Don't submit your information to websites that ask for anything more than what is needed. Banning third party cookies is like using a cannon to shoot a mosquito.

_delirium 14y ago
As an internet user, retargeting is honestly one of my #1 targets. I find it super-creepy that some websites show me things based on other websites I visit, and I want a way to stop it.
- melvinram 14y ago
  Would you rather see ads for things that are completely irrelevant? Relevance requires data. Edit: I do believe the user should have more control over what companies are allowed to retarget with an easy opt out mechanism implemented by every ad network as well as a way to limit the frequency. I've experience companies going WAY overboard on their retargeting and it feels stalker-ish.

NelsonMinar 14y ago

I blocked third party cookies in Chrome for awhile and finally gave up. It broke a surprising number of things, particularly Disqus embeds. Also the Instapaper bookmarklet although I admit that's a nerdy special case. Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired. That's a hard user interaction to get right. (Disqus apparently now works without third party cookies: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabling-cookies http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabl...)

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chrisblackwell 14y ago
To get sites like Disqus working while blocking third party cookies, just set an exception. I set exceptions for sites like google.com, disqus.com and evernote.com
- Encosia 14y ago
  Same here. I've been blocking third-party cookies in Chrome since the option was available, and have built up a list of exceptions that I'm comfortable with. I don't think it's reasonable that your average user would be able to figure that out though. Usually, it's not obvious at all that third-party cookie blocking is even responsible for feature breakage in the first place.
Flenser 14y ago
Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired They do. The title of the bug is "Block cookies from sites I haven't visited" and the blog post[1] explains that any site with 1st party cookies can set 3rd party cookies on other sites. Apparently this is how Safari works too. [1]http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-policy/ http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-polic...
- 14y ago

lubos 14y ago

I don't think third-party cookies are such a big deal. It won't stop retargeting (workarounds are possible) so what is it really solving?

cremnob 14y ago
What are some of the workarounds?
- taf2 14y ago
  etags, png image, something about tcp stack tracking... there are work arounds and there will be more workarounds... blocking cookies is stupid... they are part of the web
  - taf2 14y ago
    here's a new one css ever cookie, shit it out in an hour after reading this post: https://gist.github.com/taf2/5022672 https://gist.github.com/taf2/5022672
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

cft 14y ago

I cannot fully rationalize it, but I intuitively feel that this "holier than thee" Mozialla's approach will ultimately contribute to Firefox's demise.

cpeterso 14y ago
Safari already uses this cookie policy.
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  While I don't agree that this is indictive of Firefox's demise, saying "fourth place browser does it" is hardly a compelling counterpoint.
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    Safari on iOS is an important browser, in terms of market share.
mehrzad 14y ago
But better for the web. Maybe some of their ideas aren't feasible but at least they get people to talk/think about this stuff.

sokrates 14y ago

This is awesome. I have had third-party cookies disabled in Chrome for a long time now, and I rarely experienced any issues with embeds (Disqus being the noteworthy exception). While Idespise third-party tracking embeds in general, they have gained significant traction on the web (the worst offender is of course Facebook). Since many people think site owners cannot be blamed for that (I think they can), blocking third-party cookies to me is the next best thing for the end user. Also, it's just intuitive to me; when I visit a shop, and I identify myself to the clerk, why should I automatically identify to all bystanders in the shop?

Dylan16807 14y ago

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3488893&cid=42991759 http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3488893&cid=4299... Uh oh. Any site that you visit even once can give you a cookie and suddenly become immune to third-party blocking.

Encosia 14y ago
That's actually a pretty elegant solution to the issues that most of Firefox's userbase would encounter if all third-party cookies were blocked (e.g. not being able to log in with or share via their Twitter and Facebooks accounts). How often do real users, particularly the ones who are unaware that cross-site tracking is even going on, visit domains like doubleclick.net or googleads.g.doubleclick.net? For comparison, I block third-party cookies in Chrome and doubt that most users would be able to navigate the process of understanding when that breaks features on sites and then resolving the issue by selectively allowing the impacted domains. So, I think that's a positive feature in Firefox's (soon-to-be) implementation.

taf2 14y ago

this is short cited. we don't even know or can imagine the type of interesting applications we are eliminating by saying no to third party cookies. I remember building a reservation widget that loaded via an iframe on a third party domain. Perhaps we would want to maintain some of the reservation history on the users browser (e.g. third party cookie). I believe this would still work, but as we continue to focus only on the use case of advertising and blocking re-marketing ads... we should remember there are other legit use cases for third party cookies.

dfgonzalez 14y ago

I don't like this, beyond the discussion if 3rd party cookies are good or bad, these measures are always for the worst. Not long ago IE set DoNotTrack by default. What happened? Every single company that respected the user decision for DoNotTrack, stopped doing so since it wasn't the user, but a browser the one who decided that. Long story short: All the effort done with DoNotTrack was wasted. With this story, cookie tracking is far from perfection. It might be great for ad companies, might me useful for retailers and might be creepy for some users, but IMO is the safest way there's to date to keep the equilibrium. There are choices to be protected from cookie tracking and there's plenty of information.

nwh 14y ago
There's a critical difference here though. DNT was asking not to be tracked, not allowing the cookies is forcing it.

gtani 14y ago

Per links on Duckduckgo, i installed FF plugins: noScript, privacyFix, doNotTrackMe, HTTPS everywhere, adBlock. Now maybe 5-8% of sites i visit show no content whatsoever, and maybe 1/3 of all sites total are broken. For those, Chrome http://fixtracking.com/#firefox http://fixtracking.com/#firefox

unclebucknasty 14y ago

With so many APIs in use, integrations, etc, there will be the potential for a lot of broken stuff. And many non-tech users won't understand why some sites suddenly stopped working. It will just present more challenges for developers of good apps that users want, in order to stop one set of specific behaviors that they do not want. But advertisers won't just go home. They will find other ways to reach people with possibly more obnoxious and/or invasive tactics. Reminds me of the spam problem. With all of the spam "solutions" and policies in place, it is now much harder than it should be for legit businesses to send emails to customers who've requested them. Yet spammers are still doing their thing with impunity.