Chrome Users Now Worth 30% Less Money Thanks to Google's Cookie Killing

There's a part of me that welcomes this. Sites that require logins for no good reason are at least broadcasting their desire to spy on you, which means you can make an informed decision. That's orders of magnitude better than sites that just spy on you without warning you.

First-party cookies are not going away. I think the article should've explained that the website domain in the URL bar is the first party. The first-party website can load things from other parties, the third parties.

> For one thing, Chrome isn’t the first browser to block tracking cookies (formerly known as third-party cookies). Safari and Firefox, for example, have blocked these cookies for a long time.

Not all third-party cookies are tracking cookies. I think Firefox blocks only third-party tracking cookies by default, not all third-party cookies [1]. Not sure about Safari. But it's hard for the average website visitor to tell whether a third-party cookie is for tracking, so blocking all third-party cookies is a good idea.

> Others, especially big retailers including Amazon, Disney, and Walmart, are developing their own advertising businesses harnessing the mountains of data they already have about their customers. Meanwhile, you can expect websites all over the internet to fight to get you to log in so they can track you themselves.

I'm glad that the article brings up login walls.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention fingerprinting at all. Fingerprinting [2] lets third parties on website X figure out that the user who is currently visiting website X also visited website X a day ago. Fingerprinting also lets third parties on website X figure out that the user who is currently visiting website X also has visited a website Y that has the same third parties. The Topics API [3] (used to be the FLoC API) in the "Privacy Sandbox" gives third parties information about the user's preferences. Even though removing third-party cookies means removing one tracking vector, Google Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" gives third parties a new tracking vector.

From less privacy to more privacy, the current order is roughly:

1. third-party cookies + "Privacy Sandbox" + fingerprinting

2. third-party cookies + fingerprinting

3. "Privacy Sandbox" + fingerprinting

4. non-tracking third-party cookies + fingerprinting

5. fingerprinting

Google Chrome is type 1 now and will be type 3 in the future. Firefox is type 4. You can manually disable all third-party cookies for Firefox (type 5) [1]. Firefox mitigates fingerprint-based tracking, but fingerprinting is impossible to eliminate completely. Regardless, today's Firefox already is a net-positive for privacy compared to future third-party-cookieless Google Chrome.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...

[2] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/learn

[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-priva...