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It surprises me that more people don't just block third-party cookies. No need to maintain blacklists that way. Sure, you still see ads, but it keeps tracking a
by paulgb 13y ago
It surprises me that more people don't just block third-party cookies. No need to maintain blacklists that way. Sure, you still see ads, but it keeps tracking at bay.
- radley 13y agoBecause I need cookies for all my logins and subscriptions. Ads I don't need and take up a lot of screen space.
- Encosia 13y agothird-party cookies are rarely necessary for logins (typically just when logging in with oAuth providers like Facebook and Twitter).
- Terretta 13y agoI block third party cookies, Ghostery, and block Flash. I've even opted out on the various ad tracking opt out aggregators. I still get shown ads correlating to other sites I've visited, searches I've done, or emails I've received on Gmail. I searched for Niles and Russound multi-room audio one Friday last summer, and HTD.com (Home Theater Direct) has been showing me whole house amps everywhere I go ever since. The third party cookie block doesn't seem to help much any more.
- Pacabel 13y agoThat's a pretty bold claim to make. If third-party scripts or images are still being requested, then what prevents a site- and/or page-specific identifier from being included in the URLs of those assets? And what then prevents those site IDs, page IDs, the IP address you used to make the requests, your user agent's User-Agent string, the Referer header values, and other identifying information from being collected and stored? What prevents them from them from then tying this information together in a way that tracks you and your browsing behavior? Keep in mind that cookies of any type are not at all necessary for such tracking to occur. The only way to truly avoid that kind of tracking is to not make any such requests in the first place.
- lmkg 13y agoI work in web analytics. Recently, one of our clients decided that they wanted to track visitors across multiple domains. After much hemming and hawing, and research proposals, and industry comparisons, the ultimate solution that was decided upon was... third-party cookies. The change is extremely simple, and the data loss from people who block third-party cookies is like 5%. So what prevents sites from deploying these technologies? Economics. To your point, there are no insolvable technical barriers. But right now the marginal return return on these technologies in no way stacks up to the marginal effort required to deploy them. Considering the fraction of the population that even knows what a cookie even is, I do not anticipate this changing in the near future. If everyone starts blocking third-party cookies, then yes we'll see an uptick in use, but I don't see that happening this decade.
- username223 13y agoNot so much. AFAICT anything including an IFRAME to Google (e.g. a map) will set their tracking cookie, and anything fetched from any of their servers will probably try to identify you via browser fingerprinting. To do anything that really matters, you need to block the HTTP requests.
- paulgb 13y agoI just tested this and it's simply not true. Cookie headers to an iframe from a third-party domain are suppressed when third-party cookie blocking is on, and sent when cookie blocking is off. Google whitelists their own third-party cookies by default in Chrome and it's possible other browsers come with a preset whitelist as well, maybe that's what you encountered.
- aj 13y agoCitation for the whitelist claim?
- paulgb 13y agoThere was an exception for Google in my cookie whitelist that I didn't put there, but after checking some other chrome installs it isn't on all of them.
- username223 13y agoYou're probably right -- I can't create a reproducible test case now. Still, given the browser fingerprinting, you're best off blocking the HTTP connection.