Google Just Disabled Cookies for 30 Million Chrome Users. Here’s How to Tell If You’re One of Them | It’s the beginning of the end in Google’s plan to kill cookies forever::It’s the beginning of the end in Google’s plan to kill cookies forever.

  • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    third party cookies != cookies

    Unless they’ve invented a stateful http, cookies aren’t going anywhere.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You don’t need cookies to keep track of the state. JavaScript can do that without cookies, 3rd party clients can do that without cookies.

      • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
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        11 months ago

        Still, the use of cookies as key elements used to persist client session identifiers in the browser is too widespread and relied upon by prevalent web powerhouses like PHP for Google to do away with them.

        Moreover, as much as there may be more modern, sleek alternatives like browser session and application storage, you can’t realistically expect the entire web industry to completely migrate away from cookies just like that.

        • qisope@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          and if you’re working on a site with a ton of subdomains, sharing the local/session storage data between them is a pain when compared with cookies.

        • LWD@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I’m kind of surprised that third party cookies could entirely be phased out. Which, if they were only being used for tracking and advertising, good riddance.

          Don’t services like Microsoft still like to throw around cookies between multiple domains, though? At least, at one point I thought they did.

          • t3rminus@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            They definitely used to, but haven’t for a long time. It’s been viewed as an unreliable and poor practice, especially with browsers like Safari and Firefox which have already disabled 3rd Party Cookies for some time now (or at least providing the option to, as a privacy feature).

            Now CORS, OAUTH, and similar mechanisms do a better, more private, and more secure job of sharing state and authentication across domains and groups of services.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The amount of tech relying on cookies is slowly decreasing. Removing cookie support completely today is not an option, but it will be in the future.

      • wooki@lemmynsfw.com
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        11 months ago

        Well there it is, the dumbest thing I’ve read on the internet today.

        Go back to basics and start with html.

  • Substance_P@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Not really a win for the casual web user - What Google will stop doing is selling web ads targeted to individual users’ browsing habits, and its Chrome browser will no longer allow cookies that collect that data for the means of selling to third party advertisers.

    Meanwhile, Google will still track and target users on mobile devices, and it will still target ads to users based on their behavior on its own platforms, which make up the majority of its revenue and won’t be affected by the change.

    Ad companies that rely on cookies will simply have to find another way to target users.

    • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ad companies that rely on cookies will simply have to find another way to target users.

      Aka pay google instead of getting that info for free

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      that sounds a lot like unfair competition, to a degree that it is highly illegal in most countries.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I think Google’s biggest argument against it being a monopoly is that the tech is open source. You can download Chromium and your ad data will be manipulated and abused the same way as if you downloaded Chrome itself.

        Open source is not a synonym for good, unfortunately. It’s usually a good indicator of it, but never a guarantee.

        In the case of Chromium sucking, it’s because Google is the exclusive gatekeeper for what code actually gets added to the browser.

        • carl_dungeon@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Chromium is open source but isn’t chrome a closed source down stream project? Kinda like how Google’s RCS is in no way open despite all their BS ads bitching about iMessage?

          • LWD@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            You’re completely correct. Chromium includes the badly named “Privacy Sandbox”, and much more proprietary Google stuff. It’s a bit of a chore for independent developers to strip out the Google code from Chromium.

            Chrome itself is built atop Chromium and throws in even more closed-source stuff.

            I hope regulators start paying attention to Google, but Chrome has been the dominant web browser for a while now and Google has basically had free play with web standards up until this point, so I’m not holding my breath.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Well that decreases the total tracking Chrome web users would be exposed to. Google would track the same, third parties would track less. If third party ad networks weren’t total pieces of shit that leak private data all over the place including to data brokers, I’d have a bigger problem with it. Right now, in a sort of a fucked up way, it’s a net positive.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      Killing 3rd party cookies is good, but doing it in a way that drives business to Google Ad Services seems like a textbook case of anticompetitive behavior to me. I wonder what makes them think they can get away with it. Or maybe they don’t think they can but they’re grasping at straws to keep their money printing machine operational.

      • Madis@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I wonder what makes them think they can get away with it.

        That part:

        Killing 3rd party cookies is good,

        There doesn’t seem to be any pushback for keeping third party cookies, just the “Privacy Sandbox” is not a better solution by any means.

  • that guy@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Google should not be setting standards on something that is supposed to be open. Google should be getting dismantled and divided into individual companies that would fail without the surveillance apparatus that is the real product, which is why it will never happen and why they’re given unchecked power

    • Madis@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Google is not the only browser vendor trying to kill third party cookies.

      • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Go on. Who else is?
        Firefox has protections in place to put them in containers, and users can block them if they choose but neither is killing them.

        Let alone kill them to replace it with your own worse system lol

          • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Brave is chromium, so that doesnt count lol.
            But huh, TIL.
            Nice to see that safari and firefox already had plans to fully block them. Im kinda scared of websites breaking as in my current firefox setup, that blocks 3th party cookies, things like teams are broken already without an exception so im sure this will block a lot of shit. Thats good, but oh shit…

  • Kethal@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Firefox did this 4 years ago and didn’t replace them with an alternative tracking method.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Back in 2019, years of bad news about Google, Facebook, and other tech companies’ privacy malpractices got so loud that Silicon Valley had to address it.

    Google, which makes the vast majority of its money tracking you and showing you ads online, announced that it was embarking on a project to get rid of third-party cookies in Chrome.

    “We are making one of the largest changes to how the Internet works at a time when people, more than ever, are relying on the free services and content that the web offers,” Victor Wong, Google’s senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, told Gizmodo in an interview in April of 2023.

    If you open up Chrome’s settings, you’ll find a bunch of nice toggles and controls about cookies under the “Privacy and security” section.

    Other browsers, such as Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Apple’s Safari blocked third-party cookies a while ago, and they haven’t replaced them with new tracking tools, more private or otherwise.

    “Google and its subsidiary companies have tightened their grips on the throat of internet innovation, all while employing the now familiar tactic of marketing these things as beneficial for users,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent blog post.


    The original article contains 1,292 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!