Invasive scheme spotted that foxes tracker blockers Since then use has been rising, per the research. The technique has been raising mainstream concerns about “unblockable” web tracking since around 2019 - when developers spotted it being used in the wild by a French newspaper website. To wit: One worrying development - on the non-third-party-cookie-based tracking front - is detailed in this new paper by a group of privacy researchers who conducted an analysis of CNAME tracking (aka a DNS-based anti-tracking evasion technique) and found that use of the sneaky anti-tracking evasion method had grown by around a fifth in just under two years. So being slow to do privacy protection arguably isn’t very different to not offering much privacy protection at all. Given Chrome’s market share, that leaves most of the world’s web users exposed to more tracking than they otherwise would be by using a different, more privacy-proactive browser.Īnd as Mozilla’s latest anti-cookie tracking feature shows, the race to outwit adtech’s allergy to privacy (and consent) also isn’t the sort that has a finish line. But it’s fair to say that the adtech giant remains the laggard when it comes to executing on its claimed plan to beef up privacy. In April last year it rolled back a change that had made it harder for sites to access third-party cookies, citing concerns that sites were able to perform essential functions during the pandemic - though this was resumed in July.
Google has been making privacy strengthening noises since 2019, in response to the rest of the browser market responding to concern about online privacy. Google proposes new privacy and anti-fingerprinting controls for the web Google has also put the cat among the adtech pigeons by announcing a planned phasing out of support for third-party cookies in Chrome - which it said would be coming within two years back in January 2020 - although it’s still working on this “privacy sandbox” project, as it calls it (now under the watchful eye of U.K. While Apple’s Safari browser added an “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” (ITP) feature in 2017 - applying machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site scripting data to protect users’ browsing history from third-party eyes. Mozilla, for example, started making tracker blocking the default back in 2018 - going on to make ETP the default in Firefox in 2019, blocking cookies from companies identified as trackers by its partner, Disconnect. But this battle has stepped up in recent years as browser makers have been taking a tougher pro-privacy/anti-tracker stance. Tracker blocking has long been an arms race against the adtech industry’s determination to keep surveilling web users - and thumbing its nose at the notion of consent to spy on people’s online business - pouring resource into devising fiendish new techniques to try to keep watching what internet users are doing.
Such momentary exceptions allow for strong privacy protection without affecting your browsing experience,” it adds. “Only when Total Cookie Protection detects that you intend to use a provider, will it give that provider permission to use a cross-site cookie specifically for the site you’re currently visiting. There’s a “limited exception” for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-tracking purposes - Mozilla gives the example of popular third-party login providers. where it’s difficult for users to delete or block them - the features combine to “prevent websites from being able to ‘tag’ your browser, thereby eliminating the most pervasive cross-site tracking technique”, per Mozilla. The new layer of privacy wrapping “provides comprehensive partitioning of cookies and other site data between websites in Firefox”, explains Mozilla.Īlong with another anti-tracking feature it announced last month - targeting so called “supercookies” - aka sneaky trackers that store user IDs in “increasingly obscure” parts of the browser (like Flash storage, ETags and HSTS flags), i.e. Facebook cookies aren’t stored in the same tub as cookies for that sneaker website where you bought your latest kicks, and so on. Mozilla likens this to having a separate cookie jar for each site - so, for e.g. This “major privacy advance”, as it bills it, prevents cross-site tracking by siloing third-party cookies per website. In a blog post yesterday it announced that Firefox 86 has an extra layer of anti-cookie tracking built into the enhanced tracking protection (ETP) strict mode - which it’s calling “Total Cookie Protection” (TCP). Mozilla has further beefed up anti-tracking measures in its Firefox browser.
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