First-Party Sets; gaaaaaaaaaaaah.

[guigirl]

Brave joins Mozilla in declaring Google's First-Party Sets feature harmful to privacy

First-Party Sets is a proposed feature by Google that is designed to give site owners an option to declare multiple owned sites as first-party. Companies may own multiple domain names, and with first-party sets, they could get supporting browsers to handle all of the properties identical.

Currently, different domain names are considered third-parties in most cases, even if they belong to the same company. With the new technology in place, Google could group all of its properties together to improve communication and data flows between them.

Brave believes that first-party sets are harmful to user privacy, as companies may use the feature to track users across their properties. Third-party cookies, which are used for the same tracking purpose, will be a thing of the past soon.

Mozilla, the organisation that is making the Firefox web browser, declared First-Party Sets harmful back in 2020.

Brave Software, maker of the Brave browser, joined Mozilla recently in declaring first-party sets an anti-privacy feature. Brave Senior director of privacy, Peter Snyder, pointed out on the official blog that the adoption of the feature would make it harder for "user-respecting browsers to protect their users' privacy".

First-Party Sets will allow more sites to track more of your behaviour on the Web, and make it more difficult for users to predict how their information will be shared.

Until gargle inevitably removes these flags:

I dunno what it is, i can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow, every now & then, i get this vague feeling of disquiet that just possibly, gargle might not have our best interests at heart. I mean, c'mon, it's not like they're evil, or anything... Shirley!

[TbGbe]

@guigirl I'm confused (again!!); apart from tracking - what is the benefit to us (users) of this "same company/multiple sites" feature ?

they could get supporting browsers to handle all of the properties identical.

I don't even understand that "benefit"

[guigirl]

@TbGbe Pffft, you cynic, anyone would think that you want to deny gargle their benefits. Who are we, mere individual nothingnesses, to dare stand in the way of poor gargle being able to live their best life? It is our obligation, our duty, to provide gargle with all possible data, coz who could deny that what's good for gargle is good for us... Shirley!

Yes i also noticed what you did -- gargle not only keep devising these ongoing ways to track & monetise us, but they always further insult our intelligence by pretending it is for our benefit, our enhanced UX. What utter fsckwits they are.

[TbGbe]

@guigirl said in First-Party Sets; gaaaaaaaaaaaah.:

pretending it is for our benefit, our enhanced UX

I guess by UX, you are referring to "better, more targeted ads" that I will still block or just ignore (when/if blocking stops working)?

[guigirl]

@TbGbe Oooh, i hope i never become as cynical as you...

[sgunhouse]

@TbGbe The supposed.benefit is that you then have a clear linkage between domains owned by the same company. So if you want to access documents from G Suite in Gmail you can, or Facebook-owned sites, or Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. No need for exceptions to third party cookies to get them to work right.

On the other hand, will they let you choose which Google-owned sites?

[Catweazle]

I only understand that, as long as the Surveillance Advertising system is not declared illegal to create profits, Google (FB, M$, Amazon....) is going to invent a thousand and one dirty tricks to obtain user data 'to improve their service'..
I don't know if Mozilla is the ideal one to be able to denounce these practices, since they themselves use these trackings through Alphabet.inc (Google) to create their income.

[LonM]

Some sites I need to access, like microsoft services, require me to log in to and share cookies across many domains (microsoft.com, sharepoint.com, office.com). If they don't explicitly get 3rd party cookies then they can't communicate with each other, i.e. I wouldn't be able to access my files stores on the sharepoint cloud from an office web app.

That seems to be the intended use case as I'm reading it, and it would make things easier for me.

That being said, I wouldn't want my sharepoint.com cookies shared with outlook.com, because even tough its the same company one is for business the other is personal.

There's probably grounds for compromise here, but I'm not sure what it looks like.

[guigirl]

@LonM said in First-Party Sets; gaaaaaaaaaaaah.:

microsoft services

Wrt things like that, & presumably various gargle services etc, personally i don't use them & so none of the alleged user-benefits are relevant to users like me. Otoh, i suspect that for users like you [ie, those who perceive actual benefits for their use-case], this latest tracking technology represents an ethically-tortuous Mephistophelian bargain compromise, given i do not trust sites not to misuse/abuse this.

[Catweazle]

@LonM , the problem is, that MS not only share data with other services from MS, which is legit, the also share data with
Adobe, Alphabet (Google), Lotame, MediaMath, Quantcast, Verizon, Zeta Global and even keystrokes and mouse moves by TowerData.
This means, when you visit MS, half of the big advertising companies in the network are locking over your shoulder, also Google.

[TbGbe]

@LonM From my (confused) reading, there is no user control - the site declares "First-party" in their cookies and the browser accepts/allows them!

It is unclear (at best) what, if any, verification is required!?

[Catweazle]

@TbGbe