Adactio: Links—Tagged with cookies

A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web

This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.

Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.

Lou Montulli and the invention of cookie | Hidden Heroes

Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:

Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.

‘Like an atomic bomb’: So what now for the IAB’s GDPR fix after regulator snafu? - Digiday

Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.

Ban embed codes

Prompted by my article on third-party code, here’s a recommendation to ditch any embeds on your website.

Ain’t No Party Like a Third Party - CSS-Tricks

Chris is doing another end-of-year roundup. This time the prompt is “What is one thing people can do to make their website bettter?”

This is my response.

I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site.

Doc Searls Weblog · How the cookie poisoned the Web

Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.

Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.

The Doctor is incensed.

At this stage of the Web’s moral devolution, it is nearly impossible to think outside the cookie-based fecosystem.

Some long-winded thoughts on privacy policies and consent popups — Piper Haywood

A deep dive into GDPR.

Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.

Cookie Consent Speed.Run

My current score is one minute and 18 seconds. Can you beat it?

Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.

Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics

Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.

No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog

I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:

We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔

So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.

Why The Web Is Such A Mess - YouTube

Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.

Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings

Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.

Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.

In the meantime, use Firefox

Blacklight – The Markup

This is an excellent new tool for showing exactly what kind of tracking a site is doing:

Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.

Best of all, you can inspect the raw data and analyse the methodology.

There are some accompanying explainers:

Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne

Opted out experiences are ~35% faster

Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript

Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out

Surveillance giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights | Amnesty International

Amnesty International have released a PDF report on the out-of-control surveillance perpetrated by Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.

However…

This page on the Amnesty International website has six tracking scripts. Also, consent to accept tracking cookies is assumed (check dev tools). It looks like you can reject marketing cookies, but I tried that without any success.

The stone PDF has been thrown from a very badly-performing glass house.

Link tags: cookies

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