Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

Chrome had SPDY support not just before any other web browser did, but before any open web server did—because Chrome had SPDY support before Google ever documented that there was such as thing as “SPDY.” It was, at first, just turned on as a special Chrome-to-Google.com accelerator, spoken only between that browser and that server, because only they knew it.

I don’t fault Google for this: they’re doing “internal” R&D with protocols, and then RFCing them if-and-when they turn out to have been a good design for at least their use-case with plenty of experimental data to confirm that. Which is exactly how the RFC process is intended to be used: spreading things that are known to work.

It’s just kind of surprising that “internal” R&D, in their case, means “billions of devices running their software are all auto-updated to speak the protocol, and start speaking it—at least to Google’s own servers—making it immediately become a non-negligible percentage of Internet packet throughput.” (Which is a troubling thing to have happen, if you’re a network equipment mfgr, and you expected to have some time while new protocols are still “nascent” to tune your switches for them.)

Like if I were to be caught doing this to a random woman it would be appropriately labelled 'stalking' yet when a company does it they potentially have a patentable marketing technique on their hands or something.

Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit. At this point, all the advertising profits are sucked out of the web by Facebook and Google. The rest of the industry, including publishers are just struggling to get by while two trillion dollar behemoths throw them scraps.