Jonathan Mayer, an online privacy activist has provided Firefox with a patch that will block third party advertisers’ cookies. The patch will be bundled with release 22 of Firefox and will make Firefox behave like Safari and accept cookies from sites you have actually visited ( First party sites) and block cookies from third party sites like advertisers.
Firefox is already supporting Do Not Track header which effectively asks advertisers to not track the users’ behavior around the web. However, with Mayer’s patch, Firefox will make it the default setting to not welcome third-party cookies from advertisers.
Cookies are digital identifiers which can be used by third party advertisers to track users online behavior and serve targeted ads based on this.
The advertisers are not happy with this development and have already termed it ” a nuclear first strike.” However, with the facts that Safari has already been doing it for ten years and the share of Firefox is declining in the browsers market, the effect of blocking third party cookies by Firefox may not be devastating for the advertisers.
Source: WEB POLICY (JONATHAN MAYER)
