this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024

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Why has Firefox not removed third-party cookies, despite the fact that Chrome has begun phasing them out? (lemy.lol)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 217 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.

Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago

You’re telling me Firefox is the better browser?! Well colour me surprised.

[+] Spotlight7573 -12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Not sure how Chrome's alternatives for providing relevant ads are harder to block when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it's collected) in the settings. These systems are what Chrome is able to do at the moment to work towards blocking third party cookies. They do have an incentive to make something that they know works well for them though, I'll give you that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

when you can just turn them off (and examine the data it’s collected) in the settings

Is that part of the chromium engine which is open source or is it closed source ? Because if that part of the code is not visible it doesn't matter what Google tells you.

[–] Spotlight7573 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

It's part of the open source chromium engine.

Here's how it implements some of the privacy sandbox stuff for example: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox/

and here's some of the Topics API stuff: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/components/browsing_topics/

Theoretically they could still inject malicious code even if the stuff in the chromium source code looks fine. Given they got sued for their servers still tracking you while Chrome was in Incognito mode (even with the warning every time you open Incognito mode), I'd imagine any injection of code like that would result in another lawsuit (or several). At some point you either have to trust that Google is implementing things how they say they are in the code that they put out or just use a different browser.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I checked your link but as most people I'm not programmer, so we can't check or even remotely understand what Google engineers does. On the other hand, what common people can understand is 'follow the money ́. Google makes most of its money on selling personalized ads, the more data they get on you the higher advertiser will bid.

It would make absolutely no sense, financially, for Google to reduce it's tracking ability and let the user decide which ad they want to see or not.

And at the end Google is a business, money goes in, more money goes out. They could be doing what they claim to do right now, only to change in 2 years when all third party advertiser are bankrupt because they can't use cookies anymore. That's another possibility.

[–] Spotlight7573 1 points 10 months ago

The way I see it, Google knows that changes are coming to the advertising industry, either through regulations or just public opinion. By doing this now, they can try to get ahead of those changes/criticisms while controlling what systems their advertising competitors will have to operate under. I don't doubt that Google will still have enough data to do relevant advertising, either with the data from these new systems in the browser or the first-party data they have on people through their sites.

[–] thrawn 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As a relative layman I also have the same question. If you can turn it off, what makes it so bad?

I’m not saying I trust Google, of course. It just seems like they have a vested interest in screwing over third party advertisers and making them more dependent on Google. If you can then disable the Google part, isn’t it a net benefit?

(I don’t use chrome and am not familiar with this change, so I may be missing something)

[–] Spotlight7573 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Strictly speaking, it's an improvement over the current situation where you are tracked across the web to come up with a profile of your interests which is then used to deliver targeted advertising. The interest-based advertising is the end goal, it's where Google makes its money. Google doesn't necessarily need your data or to track you across the web to do that. I think people are unhappy that it doesn't go far enough and just want either no targeted advertising or no advertising at all. Removing the ability to target ads would result in more ads being needed to make up for lower quality placements, which I believe would lead to increased ad blocker usage and an advertising death spiral. News sites are already almost practically unusable on mobile without blocking ads for example. Having no advertising means getting revenue another way such as paywalls and subscriptions.

With the Topics API, your browser will keep track of your history and provide sites with a limited number of topics (1 per week). Instead of being an opaque system on an ad provider's server, you can examine and modify the topics being used in your browser or even look at the source code of the feature in the browser itself. With the Protected Audience API, the ad bidding process can occur in the browser as well instead of on a remote server. These features can be turned off.

There is definitely some concern that they're screwing over third-party advertisers which is why their pages come with stuff like:

subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)

Regardless, Chrome ditching third-party cookies means that websites can no longer rely on them and must adapt their sites to function without them. This will mean that Firefox's Total Cookie Protection should work better and they can remove third-party cookies in the future instead of having to create workarounds.

[–] [email protected] 127 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Firefox blocks known trackers and isolates third party cookies per site. They do have legitimate uses, and not every site has made the switch to modern tech that could replace it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party-cookies/

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

That's the superior approach and Firefox introduced it far earlier than Google addressed the problem.

Why OP is blindly arguing in that corp's favor and ignoring all the reasoning provided here, is beyond me. Shilling?

[–] rambaroo 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah my company uses them for integrating some of our apps together. They aren't used for tracking at all, and we'd be up shits creek if they were, because our (corporate) customers audit that sort of thing.

Because of Google we've had to create an alternative solution which has taken years to develop and is only getting deployed now. Those fuckers have way too much power over the Internet.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 10 months ago (2 children)

There's a check box in FF settings to block all third party cookies.

You should probably educate yourself before making inaccurate claims.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

The option to disable third party cookies has been in pretty much every browser (Chrome included) for decades. OP is talking about Google's move to make it the default.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago

Firefox has been able to block all third-party / cross-site cookies for ages. It's just not the default because it breaks some sites. But dive into the settings and you can easily set it to block all cross-site cookies, or even all cookies if you prefer.

[–] Ghostalmedia 36 points 10 months ago

I’m confused. Didn’t this start at the beginning of last year?

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-protection/

[+] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[+] [email protected] -36 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Third-party cookies make tracking users easier. I am not asking Firefox to follow Chrome at each step.

I am just asking for the privacy browser to improve users' privacy by removing support for third-party cookies, because it theoretically will not break anything.

[–] c10l 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

3rd party cookies make tracking users easier when the same cookie can be used on many websites.

Firefox does 2 things to protect you from that: it blocks known trackers cookies by default; and for the others it isolates them per domain so that kind of tracking doesn’t happen. That ensures you’re not tracked and at the same time it doesn’t break any functionality.

If you want to completely block them you can. There’s more info here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-firefox-tracking-protection

[+] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Spotlight7573 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how moving stuff like topics of interest into the browser where it can be modified/turned off by the user in a single, local location isn't an improvement over the current situation?

[–] atrielienz 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because google is still tracking you. They are just getting rid of third party cookies being able to follow you on the web. They have fingerprinted the chrome browser itself, so every instance of it is unique to the individual using it (or their hardware) with the intent of continuing to track you while making it difficult for other third parties to do the same. And they're using deceptive language to make it seem like that's not what's happening. That language may not work on everyone but it will work on the vast majority especially of younger gen people who just aren't as tech savvy despite how much tech is integrated into their lives.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You clearly don't know what you're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's why they're asking

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

They're asking in a presumptive, judgemental way

[–] Spotlight7573 9 points 10 months ago

I believe Mozilla said it best here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/01/26/improving-privacy-without-breaking-the-web/

Firefox’s privacy protections must be usable on the web, or people will simply stop using Firefox altogether.

The web is not at the stage yet where third-party cookies can be disabled entirely. Chrome's phase out of them this year should push all those sites still clinging to them to fix their sites. This should mean less problems when using Firefox's privacy features. Firefox won't necessarily need to remove the feature soon anyways since it already isolates them per site.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

It's been an option for as long as I can remember. I suppose they are leaving the default until websites adapt to chromes changes.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They will likely remove them soon I suppose. And it's easier to leave the option available in case it breaks someone's use-case until they fix it.

[–] MeanEYE 15 points 10 months ago

Mine has been blocking for years now. It's already there, just not on by default. It does break some sites so am assuming that's the reason. I just got use to the fact some sites will stop working and moved on.

[–] 5opn0o30 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think they took a different approach and block known trackers but not all cookies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

money