As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. From a report: The “Total Cookie Protection” feature is included in the web browser’s latest release — alongside multiple picture-in-picture views — and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you…
Tag: Cookies
Firefox 85 Isolated Supercookies, But Dropped Progressive Web App Support
Tech blogger Paul Thurrott writes:
Firefox 85 now protects users against supercookies, which Mozilla says is “a type of tracker that can stay hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you clear cookies. By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to the next.” It also includes small improvements to bookmarks and password…
Google Says It May Have Found a Privacy-Friendly Substitute To Cookies
Google says its new machine learning algorithms could replace cookie-based ad targeting without invading your privacy. Axios reports: Google has been testing a new API (a software interface) called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that acts as an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies. The API exists as a browser extension within Google Chrome. The company said Monday that tests of…
Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want To Visit Us?
Avi Loeb, former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and who chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, writing at Scientific American: It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us;…
Google Employees Try Baking Recipes Created by AI
“Behold the cakie: It has the crispiness of a cookie and the, well, ‘cakiness’ of a cake.” So says a triumphant blog post by Google Cloud’s developer advocate and an applied AI Engineer for Google’s Cloud AI. “We also made breakies, which were more like fluffy cookies, almost the consistency of a muffin” (or bread). Food and Wine explains the project…
Google Ad Changes Face UK Probe in First Shot at Big Tech
Google is the U.K.’s first big post-Brexit antitrust target as regulators opened a probe into the company’s planned changes to curb publishers’ collection of advertising data. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said it’s investigating Google’s so-called privacy sandbox changes that could “undermine the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market…
Firefox To Ship ‘Network Partitioning’ As a New Anti-Tracking Defense
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox 85, scheduled to be released next month, in January 2021, will ship with a feature named Network Partitioning as a new form of anti-tracking protection. The feature is based on “Client-Side Storage Partitioning,” a new standard currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Privacy Community Group. “Network Partitioning is highly…
Streaming TV Advertisers Want Better Targeting — Minus the Privacy Backlash
Advertisers entering the burgeoning medium of streaming TV say they want better measurement and targeting capabilities than they are finding there. But a shadow looms over any efforts to give them what they want: the privacy backlash that has recently put other digital media on the defensive. From a report: That means obtaining viewers’ consent to use information on what they…
Brave Browser First To Nix CNAME Deception
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies. The browser security model makes a distinction between first-party domains — those being visited — and third-party domains — from the suppliers of things like…
Chrome Caught Exempting Google Sites From User Requests To Delete Data
This week the Verge reported: If you ask Chrome to delete all cookies and site data whenever you quit the browser, it’s reasonable to expect that this policy applies to all websites. Recently, though, a bug in the browser meant data wasn’t being removed for two sites in particular: Google and YouTube. This problem was first documented by iOS developer Jeff…