For those who don’t care to read the full article:
This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.
So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.
Hahahahaha so it doesn’t break anything that still relies on cookies, but neuters the ability to share them.
That’s awesome
Honestly, I thought that’s how it already worked.
Edit: I think what I’m remembering is that you can define the cookies by site/domain, and restrict to just those. And normally would, for security reasons.
But some asshole sites like Facebook are cookies that are world-readable for tracking, and this breaks that.
Someone correct me if I got it wrong.
Total Cookie Protection was already a feature, (introduced on Feb 23st 2021) but it was only for people using Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on strict mode.
They had a less powerful third-party cookie blocking feature for users that didn’t have ETP on strict mode, that blocked third party cookies on specific block lists. (i.e. known tracking companies)
This just expanded that original functionality, by making it happen on any domain, and have it be the default for all users, rather than an opt-in feature of Enhanced Tracking Protection.
They’ve been doing this with container tabs, so this must be the successor to that idea (I’m going to assume they’ll still have container tabs).
Isn’t this basically Firefox’s version of the third party cookie block that Chrome rolled out a few months ago? Or am I missing something here?
I mean, it’s good news either way but I just want to know if this is somehow different or better.
Disabling cross site cookie is already a thing for decades…
Same with Do Not Track requests.
Do Not Track has never really done anything, it just asks websites politely to not track you. There’s no legal or technical limitation here.
I still much rather have it than not. It also lead to the spiritual successor GPC which does actually have regulatory requirements under the CCPA.
Disabling cross site cookies and allowing them to exist while siloed within the specific sites that need them are two different things.
Previous methods of disabling cross site cookies would often break functionality, or prevent a site from using their own analytics software that they contracted out from a third party.
Thank you for your explanation, tbat greatly clears up my confusion.
TBH, if a person’s concern is being tracked by, for example, Facebook; then this just lets Facebook continue tracking them without directly allowing Facebook’s anaylitics customers to track them to another site directly (but indirectly that information can still be provided). But I guess for all the people giving FB and Google those proviledges better to have this than not.