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Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

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Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#121

Post by driverdan »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #8

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 par…

Blocking 3rd party cookies breaks surprisingly few things. Sure, a few services might not work but you can add exceptions if you want to use them. Overall it has almost no negative impact on your web experience.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#122

Post by taf2 »

indymike wrote: post #97
chewxy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a general rule of thumb that a person has to look at/interact with/be cognitively aware of an ad at least 7 times before any action can be taken. Showing ads across sites is just one more way to do that. In fact I would rather have relevant ads show up than irrelevant ads. I will admit that many companies out there do overdo their retargeting campaign though. That's what the company does that is mistaken, no…

New Relic, I'm looking at you. I don't think I've seen a banner for anything other than New Relic for a month and I have New Relic and use it every day.

Would you rather see ads for the tanning salon or the hot waxing ads?? Really if you are a newrelic customer and only see their ads they are not running a very good campaign.. From a conversion perspective your are a waste of their money... But from the standpoint if getting you to come back and continue to use and talk about them - its working great

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#123

Post by chenster »

moxie wrote: post #45
chewxy wrote: post #6

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 pix…

I'm interested in the culture implications of your willingness to comment on a story like this and openly admit that you work in this area of the advertising (surveillance?) industry. Certainly, I don't think anyone would feel comfortable commenting on a story about SPAM mitigation techniques (without using a throwaway account) with text like "This sucks, I'm a spammer, and I'm really excited about it. Don't like SPA…

> I've always assumed that anyone with the technical ability to install ABP immediately did so.

Why is that?

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#124

Post by unclebucknasty »

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.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#125

Post by mdavidn »

dangrossman wrote: post #107

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

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.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#126

Post by moxie »

Amadou wrote: post #81
brownbat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather have relevant ads Me too, soo much. I was really counting on that until it never actually materialized. Looking over my last few months of purchases, advertising could have struck a real coup by helping me find the lowest priced dry cleaner in my area, or by letting me know I could buy a USB device that lets me use an xBox controller in Windows. Instead, all I hear is that when I drink a certain Vodk…

I'm sure what I am about to say is no great insight here on HN, but I like saying it so here it is: There are two kinds of advertising: 1) Advertising that helps you find what you need 2) Advertising that convinces you to spend money you would not otherwise have spent The lofty ideal has always been (1) but the reality seems to always turn out to be (2). We should stop giving lip-service to the lofty ideal.

Another way to look at it might be that #1 did happen, it's just called the internet.

Twitter, for example, has an entire team of people working on "search and relevance." This is essentially #1, but it's not advertising, it's just how Twitter works. The core concept of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even HN is that you should be seeing the content that you find interesting.

What we call advertising in that context necessarily has to subvert #1. If it was the content that is already the most "relevant" to a user, there would be no reason for an advertiser to pay in order to make it visible to that user, since it would be what is naturally presented.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#127

Post by nwh »

dfgonzalez wrote: post #110

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…

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

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#128

Post by aghull »

Flenser wrote: post #66
NelsonMinar wrote: post #8

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 par…

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-polic...

This is the same behaviour as Safari has had by default for years. App developers that depend on 3rd-party cookies should in general already have the work-arounds in place to support Firefox 22 assuming they already support Safari.

Re: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

#129

Post by X-Istence »

majormajor wrote: post #100
brugidou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that creepy? Both websites are related through a retargeter. One sends the data over to the other. It's just like they were the same websites or same corporation. If you don't like this then you can avoid theses websites that sell/buy your information. Although that's a good chunk of the Internet. Just make sure you send private information to trusted sites only.

One big creepy part is that people share computers. Used to be that someone could try to dig through your history if they wanted to (but most people didn't), but now some of your history gets pushed right to them. I'm looking at you, Amazon banner ads that feature products I browsed recently. (This is lots of fun because I often use Amazon solely to get info on a product that I may have no intention at all of purchas…

No Amazon I am not interesting a my little pony book, a vibrating pink dildo or a 55 gallon drum of lube.

I was visiting those items because I was linked to them due to people posting funny comments on the items, I have absolutely no interest in them.

Although, at some level I do find the way that Amazon does their targeting can be fairly accurate.

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