Maintaining the status quo
While Google’s sandbox project is looking more directionless today, it is not completely ending the initiative. The team still plans to deploy promised improvements in Chrome’s Incognito Mode, which has been re-architected to preserve user privacy after numerous complaints. Incognito Mode blocks all third-party cookies, and later this year, it will gain IP protection, which masks a user’s IP address to protect against cross-site tracking.
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Chavez admits that this change will mean Google’s Privacy Sandbox APIs will have a “different role to play” in the marke
10 Comments
legitster
> In some ways, this is a loss—tracking cookies are undeniably terrible, and Google's proposed alternative is better for privacy, at least on paper. However, universal adoption of the Privacy Sandbox could also give Google more power than it already has, and the supposed privacy advantages may never have fully materialized as Google continues to seek higher revenue.
Cookies are much maligned these days, but to defend them a little bit – the alternatives are almost universally worse for user privacy. Persistent session storage? Browser fingerprinting? Locking everything behind a user account with mandatory sign-in? Blegh.
On the other hand, cookies are a pretty transparent interaction. It's a tiny file that sites in your browser. You can look at them. They expire on their own. You as a user can delete, modity, edit, hack them to your heart's content. They contain no PII on their own. They are old-fashioned and limited and that's a good thing.
The real problem here is not the cookie – it's the third party data networks. I would much rather focus our ire on the function rather than the form.
ocdtrekkie
This article seems to avoid talking about the elephant in the room: Every other browser just blocks third party cookies with no replacement. And Chrome would too if it wasn't owned by an ad company.
This should be the central argument the DOJ uses to separate Chrome from Google: The entire web for a monopoly-size portion of users is massively less secure because the web browser is owned by a company which is very vested in it being less secure.
gnabgib
Related:
Google scraps plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome (26 points, 9 months ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046637
Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users (511 points, 8 months ago, 311 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
What Google's U-Turn on Third-Party Cookies Means for Chrome Privacy (3 points, 7 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788239
joshdavham
Even if Google won't disable third-party cookies in Chrome, you still can!
chrome://settings/cookies
chris_wot
So turn them off by default, and whitelist the ones that are necessary. It was always a stupid idea to get rid of them completely.
grishka
The only somewhat good use for third-party cookies is various embeds and comment widgets. It wouldn't be all that much of a loss for the users if third-party cookies were removed without a replacement, but with the developer of the world's most popular web browser and the world's most popular mobile OS also being the world's richest internet advertising company, that's apparently an absolute impossibility ¯_(ツ)_/¯
sublinear
I'm not sure I've ever understood the point of this.
Aren't all cookies trivially "any-party" cookies? Can't any form of persistence be used to track a user? 3rd-party cookies as they exist today just give a path of least resistance so that most of that behavior is implemented the same way. Consistent implementation allows the user a simple way to block that behavior.
est
weird stuff happen when an advertising company is making web browsers. Anti-trust should happen faster to stop the monopoly
ChrisArchitect
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43764062
creatonez
Not surprising. Chrome is deeply compromised by Google's incentives.