Firefox 22 will block third-party cookies by default (and most people who would know about this, and know how to enable them, wouldn't choose to do it). So we can basically assume that from v22 onwards, Firefox won't support third-party cookies.
Does anyone else think that this is a bad idea?
It's intended to protect against tracking, but if we're talking about the kind of tracking that allows Doubleclick to assemble hundreds of A4 pages worth of personal data about someone, then it won't work. There are other methods of tracking - web bugs, Evercookie, etc - and the big players (Google, Facebook, etc) have the resources to use them. It's smaller operators who will be hit, like a website operator who happens to use multiple domains, and wants to gather aggregate data about user behavior across the site. And those kind of trackers aren't the real threat.
Or what about legitimate, non-tracking uses of third-party cookies? My workplace hosts a shopping cart service for various other sites. Sites embed a snippet of code from us, and that snippet shows a 'mini-cart' on the page, allowing the user to keep track of their order and click through to our payment page to check out. Without third-party cookies, that will completely break. At the moment, we're looking at organising for all the sites that use our service to work around it by first redirecting to us, and we set a cookie and redirect back, so that Firefox will trust our cookies. Ugly, and it highlights the fact that if sites are deliberately embedding third-party content, then they will find a way to collaborate with the third party and get around this.
This will cause widespread inconvenience, angst, and sometimes significant financial pressure on sites that rely on targeted advertising to stay online and free - but it will not really protect the privacy of Joe User, who makes no changes to default settings, and posts 90% of his life on Facebook and/or Twitter, including location data and the names and photos of everyone who was with him at the time.
Does anyone else think that this is a bad idea?
It's intended to protect against tracking, but if we're talking about the kind of tracking that allows Doubleclick to assemble hundreds of A4 pages worth of personal data about someone, then it won't work. There are other methods of tracking - web bugs, Evercookie, etc - and the big players (Google, Facebook, etc) have the resources to use them. It's smaller operators who will be hit, like a website operator who happens to use multiple domains, and wants to gather aggregate data about user behavior across the site. And those kind of trackers aren't the real threat.
Or what about legitimate, non-tracking uses of third-party cookies? My workplace hosts a shopping cart service for various other sites. Sites embed a snippet of code from us, and that snippet shows a 'mini-cart' on the page, allowing the user to keep track of their order and click through to our payment page to check out. Without third-party cookies, that will completely break. At the moment, we're looking at organising for all the sites that use our service to work around it by first redirecting to us, and we set a cookie and redirect back, so that Firefox will trust our cookies. Ugly, and it highlights the fact that if sites are deliberately embedding third-party content, then they will find a way to collaborate with the third party and get around this.
This will cause widespread inconvenience, angst, and sometimes significant financial pressure on sites that rely on targeted advertising to stay online and free - but it will not really protect the privacy of Joe User, who makes no changes to default settings, and posts 90% of his life on Facebook and/or Twitter, including location data and the names and photos of everyone who was with him at the time.