Firefox getting smarter about third-party cookies • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox getting smarter about third-party cookies

#101

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 11:06 AM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #99

derefr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider ad-tracking cookies set by sites {A,B,C} to be read by ad-provider X all "one cookie", then the numbers balance out. (Which I would--tracking cookies, semantically, should be considered to be stored in the ad-provider's "bucket", as far as allowing them/purging them goes.

If you consider ad-tracking cookies set by sites {A,B,C} to be read by ad-provider X all "one cookie" I'm not really sure what you mean by this. You said "almost all cookies are friendly" and I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Even if the numbers 'balance out' (which I doubt very much) that's still not close to 'almost all cookies are friendly'. The pro-cookie side of the privacy debate really needs to just admit there's…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox getting smarter about third-party cookies

#102

Post by derefr » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 11:15 AM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #82

derefr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems like all the things browsers do to allow sites to persist data on your computer (cookies, client certificates, localStorage, WebSQL/IndexedDB, the FileSystem storage API, HTML5 Application Caching...) should all be controlled by a single set of preferences/request dialogs. They wouldn't even need to break down the requests by type; it's pretty irrelevant to a user which kind of storage is going on. Co…

You could still use the plain old browser web cache to track users. Send a unique image to each user with a long expiry time with an id embedded in it somewhere, then on the page, simply read the image using javascript/canvas to get the id.

> send a unique image ... with a long expiry time

For any given mechanism, if it has different behavior between an ephemeral session and a regular, persistent one, it should trigger the warning bar. Browser caching with distant Expires is definitely one of those. In this case, disallowing the persistence would make all the retrieved resources instead have session-length cache expiry.

Think of the full effect of the warning bar + "Disallow" button as going back and pretending you had opened the page in an Incognito/Private Browsing mode tab from the start--and then making that also happen automatically for any further pages from that domain. It session-isolates caching, cookies, and basically any other form of persistence except explicit bookmarking.

Re: Firefox getting smarter about third-party cookies

#103

Post by jgalt212 » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

suhail wrote: post #87

jgalt212 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but two other big players in this space (Mixpanel and Kissmetrics) both use 3rd party cookies. Does anyone know how they plan to deal with this?

We use first party cookies and do not try to track people across websites which is what most ad networks actually do.

Hi,

Thanks for the clarification. Using 1st party cookies definitely weights Mixpanel over Kissmetrics in our eyes.