Unfortunately, I am not talking about a miraculous invention that allows you to eat as many treats as you want without gaining weight. I am talking about the digital ones, which are not as appetizing.
image from Jude Infantini on Unsplash
5 minutes read
Third-party cookies — small pieces of data that stores information about your online activity and shares it with third parties, to create a personalized profile of your interests for marketing purposes— are often considered an intrusion of privacy, and an unauthorized collection of personal data.
Despite regulatory attempts, however, many companies manage to be barely on the right side of the law, and many users are still very confused about their choices. They often unwillingly share more than they want to. And frankly, it should not be up to the consumer to figure out how to stop online companies from stealing their data. Companies should step up to the plate, and some do.
Here is the good news
Starting on June 14, 2022, the Firefox Browser is rolling out Total Cookie Protection worldwide, meaning “confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site“. According to Mozilla, maker of Firefox, this means that third-party cookies are not allowed to see your activities from other sites. This permits sites to measure analytic data, but not to sell your “behavioral data” to others, keeping a balance between personal privacy and business interests.
Just one work of caution: I have been using Firefox for a while now, while I have not seen many personalized ads since, the script that blocks third-party cookies, will also block some other, benign, scripts, such as sign up form. This is easily fixable, by opening that website only on a different browser, but it is something that you need to be aware of.
One more semi-good piece of news
Google is making it easier to reject all cookies in Europe. Of course, this happened only after France’s data protection agency CNIL fined Google €150 million ($170 million). It only applies to Google Search and YouTube (as long as you are not signed in), but we will take any improvement, no matter how small.
Read the full article on the Verve
Third-party cookies, data brokers and the personalized ad business models should not exists, in an ideal world. Until then, it is up to us and the increasing number of ethical companies providing alternatives to data-hungry monster apps (looking at you Google and Meta) to protect our privacy…or whatever is left of it.
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