Google Just Disabled Cookies for 30 Million Chrome Users. Here’s How to Tell If You’re One of Them | It’s the beginning of the end in Google’s plan to kill cookies forever::It’s the beginning of the end in Google’s plan to kill cookies forever.
third party cookies != cookies
Unless they’ve invented a stateful http, cookies aren’t going anywhere.
You don’t need cookies to keep track of the state. JavaScript can do that without cookies, 3rd party clients can do that without cookies.
Still, the use of cookies as key elements used to persist client session identifiers in the browser is too widespread and relied upon by prevalent web powerhouses like PHP for Google to do away with them.
Moreover, as much as there may be more modern, sleek alternatives like browser session and application storage, you can’t realistically expect the entire web industry to completely migrate away from cookies just like that.
and if you’re working on a site with a ton of subdomains, sharing the local/session storage data between them is a pain when compared with cookies.
I’m kind of surprised that third party cookies could entirely be phased out. Which, if they were only being used for tracking and advertising, good riddance.
Don’t services like Microsoft still like to throw around cookies between multiple domains, though? At least, at one point I thought they did.
They definitely used to, but haven’t for a long time. It’s been viewed as an unreliable and poor practice, especially with browsers like Safari and Firefox which have already disabled 3rd Party Cookies for some time now (or at least providing the option to, as a privacy feature).
Now CORS, OAUTH, and similar mechanisms do a better, more private, and more secure job of sharing state and authentication across domains and groups of services.
There’s also a lot of security gotchas when relying purely on JS.
Not really a win for the casual web user - What Google will stop doing is selling web ads targeted to individual users’ browsing habits, and its Chrome browser will no longer allow cookies that collect that data for the means of selling to third party advertisers.
Meanwhile, Google will still track and target users on mobile devices, and it will still target ads to users based on their behavior on its own platforms, which make up the majority of its revenue and won’t be affected by the change.
Ad companies that rely on cookies will simply have to find another way to target users.
Ad companies that rely on cookies will simply have to find another way to target users.
Aka pay google instead of getting that info for free
that sounds a lot like unfair competition, to a degree that it is highly illegal in most countries.
Only where non-corrupt politicians agree to enforce the law.
So. Yknow.
I think Google’s biggest argument against it being a monopoly is that the tech is open source. You can download Chromium and your ad data will be manipulated and abused the same way as if you downloaded Chrome itself.
Open source is not a synonym for good, unfortunately. It’s usually a good indicator of it, but never a guarantee.
In the case of Chromium sucking, it’s because Google is the exclusive gatekeeper for what code actually gets added to the browser.
Chromium is open source but isn’t chrome a closed source down stream project? Kinda like how Google’s RCS is in no way open despite all their BS ads bitching about iMessage?
You’re completely correct. Chromium includes the badly named “Privacy Sandbox”, and much more proprietary Google stuff. It’s a bit of a chore for independent developers to strip out the Google code from Chromium.
Chrome itself is built atop Chromium and throws in even more closed-source stuff.
I hope regulators start paying attention to Google, but Chrome has been the dominant web browser for a while now and Google has basically had free play with web standards up until this point, so I’m not holding my breath.
Privacy Sandbox so the privacy doesn’t get out. 😃
Well that decreases the total tracking Chrome web users would be exposed to. Google would track the same, third parties would track less. If third party ad networks weren’t total pieces of shit that leak private data all over the place including to data brokers, I’d have a bigger problem with it. Right now, in a sort of a fucked up way, it’s a net positive.
Killing 3rd party cookies is good, but doing it in a way that drives business to Google Ad Services seems like a textbook case of anticompetitive behavior to me. I wonder what makes them think they can get away with it. Or maybe they don’t think they can but they’re grasping at straws to keep their money printing machine operational.
So that means Chrome won’t spy on me anymore, right?
… right guys?
Sure, buddy, sure 👍
They are making sure nobody else will track you
This.
Google isn’t pro privacy, they’re anti competitive.
Haha! Ahhhh. No.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Back in 2019, years of bad news about Google, Facebook, and other tech companies’ privacy malpractices got so loud that Silicon Valley had to address it.
Google, which makes the vast majority of its money tracking you and showing you ads online, announced that it was embarking on a project to get rid of third-party cookies in Chrome.
“We are making one of the largest changes to how the Internet works at a time when people, more than ever, are relying on the free services and content that the web offers,” Victor Wong, Google’s senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, told Gizmodo in an interview in April of 2023.
If you open up Chrome’s settings, you’ll find a bunch of nice toggles and controls about cookies under the “Privacy and security” section.
Other browsers, such as Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Apple’s Safari blocked third-party cookies a while ago, and they haven’t replaced them with new tracking tools, more private or otherwise.
“Google and its subsidiary companies have tightened their grips on the throat of internet innovation, all while employing the now familiar tactic of marketing these things as beneficial for users,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent blog post.
The original article contains 1,292 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
