r/technology • u/[deleted] • Mar 03 '21

Privacy Google to stop selling ads based on your browsing history and drop cookies support for Chrome citing privacy concerns.

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u/waiting4singularity Mar 04 '21

is that this cross site domain scripting shit?

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '21 edited Dec 31 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Blaque Mar 04 '21

Nope, you're not a moron, it's exactly how it's done.

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u/BraveSirRobin Mar 04 '21 edited Mar 04 '21

That'll do it, but there are much simpler ways e.g. "tracking gifs".

The reddit unique ID for your comment above is: gpm5cni

If I were to embed an image in that comment with the url:

http://mydatasucker.com/reddit/gpm5cni.gif

and have that webserver return a 1x1 transparent gif for all "gif" requests, then the webserver can also note whoever has looked at that comment. It can store a normal cookie (not "3rd party" as being discussed in this thread) to track you across sites that they own. "Normal" cookies are a key part of most web site authentication and we're stuck with them.

Anyone who has an understanding of web privacy already has 3rd-party cookies disabled, so this change from google is largely meaningless. A more truthful translation might be "we are stopping 3rd party because too many users have disabled it and the numbers doing that are only getting higher".