(Originally posted Monday, June 24, 2013)

The advertising industry is in a huff over Mozilla’s plans to support “The Cookie Clearinghouse” at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford Law School. The Cookie Clearinghouse starts with some browser behavior changes and adds what Mozilla’s Brendan Eich describes as both block- and allow-lists of sites and a mechanism for managing exceptions to them. What would be blocked? 3^rd-party tracking cookies.

The advertising industry is indignant, as they have been in the past when their abilities to track users are impeded.

As Eich says, it will be months before this hits the release versions of Firefox but there certainly seems to be a lot of indignation out there at how much business would be lost by the Doubleclicks of the world and other sites that people don’t visit, but which visit them. That’s how 3^rd party cookies work.

And yet, something seems so familiar to me about the whole “Cookie Clearinghouse” thing… It sounds so much like…. Like Internet Explorer 9.

[cue harp strum…]

Continue reading →